The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art

by Arthur C. Danto

Danto simply and entertainingly traces the evolution of the concept of beauty over the past century and explores how it was removed from the definition of art. Beauty then came to be regarded as a serious aesthetic crime, whereas a hundred years ago it was almost unanimously considered the supreme purpose of art. Beauty is not, and should not be, the be-all and end-all of art, but it has an important place, and is not something to be avoided.
Danto draws eruditely upon the thoughts of artists and critics such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, the Dadaists, Duchamp, and Greenberg, as well as on that of philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Hegel. Danto agrees with the dethroning of beauty as the essence of art, and maintains with telling examples that most art is not, in fact, beautiful. He argues, however, for the partial rehabilitation of beauty and the removal of any critical taboo against beauty. Beauty is one among the many modes through which thoughts are presented to human sensibility in art: disgust, horror, sublimity, and sexuality being among other such modes.

Genres: Art, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art History, Theory

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Arthur C. Danto was Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. He was the author of numerous books, including Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, After the End of Art, and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013) was an American philosopher and art critic who taught at Columbia University and devoted many years to following the New York art scene and writing on contemporary art and art history. ‘The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art’ consists of an introduction and seven essays, each essay addressing a different facet of Danto’s take on art, philosophy of art, art history and beauty.

Introduction: The Aesthetics of the Brillo Box
1) Beauty and the Philosophical Definition of Art
2) The Intractable Avant-Garde
3) Beauty and Beautification
4) Internal and External Beauty
5) Beauty and Politics
6) Three Ways to Look at Art
7) The Beautiful and the Sublime.

To offer a flavor of what one will encounter in these pages, below are several comments along with author’s quotes from the introductory essay, the essay providing the tone and context for the entire collection.

Danto came to New York and Columbia University’s philosophy department in the early 1950s. He tells us he was required to study aesthetics and enjoyed the work of the city’s Abstract Expressionists, but couldn’t see the connection between what he was learning at school and the actual art produced by those artists. So, aligning himself with the university’s analytic philosophers, he concerned himself with philosophy’s connection with science and language.

But then something interesting happened in the art word – the artists of the 1960s completely turned their backs on the type of art produced by the Abstract Expressionists. These new artists created in fresh, bold, revolutionary and even anti-aesthetic ways. As Danto writes, “It was as if (the new art) and analytic philosophy were made for one another. Both were indifferent to edification and exaltation, both appealed to a kind of hard-edge thinking. It was for me a particularly exhilarating moment. I would have had no interest in being an artist in the new period. But I found it intoxicating to be a philosopher of art when art had shuffled off all the heavy metaphysical draperies the Abstract Expressionists were happy to wear as their intellectual garments, and were content to produce works that looked for all the world like commonplace objects of daily life.”

Anyone familiar with 20th century American art knows the most famous (and infamous) Pop Art looking like a commonplace object – Andy Warhol’s Brillo cartons. It was this desire to erase the division between fine art and everyday objects by Pop Artists like Warhol (and which hearkens back to the "Readymades" of Marcel Duchamp) that obsessed Danto. With his prime interest in language and the philosophical definition of art, Danto was the right philosophical man at the right time.



Ironically, Danto sees aesthetics at work on some level since the Brillo boxes were more pleasing and enjoyable to look at than the other Warhol boxes, for instance, the Heinz Ketchup boxes. To underscore this visual enjoyment, Danto cites how, after a lifetime of living with all those drab government-issued boxes, the underground Soviet artists found the Pop Art absolutely beautiful!

However, this being said, Danto notes the reality of modern art when he writes, “The philosophical conception of aesthetics was almost entirely dominated by the idea of beauty, and this was particularly the case in the 18th century – the great age of aesthetics – when apart from the sublime, the beautiful was the only aesthetic quality actively considered by artists and thinkers. And yet beauty has almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma, with its crass commercial implications.”

The 7 essays that follow address various phases and dimensions of modern Western culture’s expression of art and beauty (and lack of beauty), particularly in the 20th century. But please be aware, the world Danto is speaking about here is the art world contained within museum walls and the ideas he delineates are from post-enlightenment and modern philosophers, most notably David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G.F.W. Hegel, Roger Fry and G.E. Moore. What constitutes the cultural world for the mass of people, things like film, television and sports, are not even mentioned.

Perhaps as a way to pique interest in this carefully thought-out book, I will quote the last lines from the last essay on ‘Beauty and Sublimity’: “Beauty is an option for art and not a necessary condition. But it is not an option for life. It is a necessary condition for life as we would want to live it. That is why beauty, unlike the other aesthetic qualities, the sublime included, is a value.”

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is somewhat of a continuation of Danto’s “After the End of Art” (1997), in which he fine-tunes his thoughts on what the supposed end of art has meant for the idea of beauty. While his previous book is more of a historical overview of the developments in the understanding of aesthetics over the last few centuries, this one is much more focused on its philosophical implications. Beauty is explored as merely one of many other types of aesthetic qualities, any of which can be found in a work of art, though none are necessary to it. Especially after the modernist turn at the end of the 19th century, art has developed to the point in which beauty has become optional, and in some cases, removed completely, partly due to its so-called historical “abuse.”

How does this relate to the older understandings of art and its importance in society? How can this be understood through the lenses of philosophers of aesthetics such as Hegel and Kant? What of the immense place beauty has had in the discourse around morality and aesthetics? And what about the sublime? What is the sublime and what is its relation to beauty? Can art ever reach the sublimity dawned by nature?

Loved reading this book and enjoyed how much more focused it is compared to “After the End of Art,” though that one is arguably the more important work. Can’t wait to read more.

[Marcella · Rating 5 out of 5]

O que difere um objeto do cotidiano de uma obra de arte? Pode a arte recorrer à beleza e ao prazer estético para a representação de situações catastróficas?
Danto faz uma retomada histórica do belo na Arte desde Kant, buscando pontuar as diferenças entre a beleza artística e a natural, elucidando o declínio do belo na arte a tal ponto que a beleza se torna um atributo moralmente condenável na obra de arte. Na arte moderna, a beleza passa a se relacionar ao conteúdo da obra, num processo de intelectualização, que a transforma uma "opção para a arte e não necessariamente uma condição". No entanto, a beleza "não é apenas uma opção para a vida", mas "uma condição necessária para a vida como a queremos". "É por isso que a beleza", argumenta o autor, "diferente das outras qualidades estéticas, incluindo o sublime, é um valor".

[Patrick Probably DNF · Rating 1 out of 5]

I debated whether to give this collection of essays FIVE STARS or just ONE. The author asks all the right questions: What is art? Does art have to be beautiful? How do we judge the value of art (versus, say, a beautiful package design)? But the essays themselves are pedantic, repetitive, and often unstructured or without conclusion. The pacing approaches sub-glacial. But here's the thing: I wish more authors had the courage to tackle obscure topics like this. Because the answers are nothing less than a stark glimpse at our humanity.

[Dora · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised at how fluently Danto writes! He has a unique style, especially in comparison to other philosophers and art historians, who tend to use a kind of enigmatic metalanguage . Danto is much more blunt and even funny at certain times, yet his ideas are immensely important, perhaps even revolutionary for art theory. This just spurred me to continue reading some of his other works.

[Kurt]

Only took me like half the year to finish this thing by reading it exclusively in bits and pieces between work at the Toronto Reference Library, which is definitely not the ideal way to read academic essays on art theory! Anyway, it's decent, Danto has some good ideas about the concept of beauty, but he's also very notably wrong in two major ways:
1. He makes a strange assumption that there are certain things that no one will ever be able to find beautiful as the subject of art, and that these things are just categorically excluded from beauty as a concept. This is pretty demonstrably wrong, and there's actually a pretty good Spinoza quote from 300 years prior that states the case against it well: "Anything can accidentally be the cause of pleasure, pain, or desire."
2. He makes a claim at the very end of the book that beauty is "necessary for life", or at least I have to assume human life (and to clarify, that also means "life worth living"). But like the previous one, this also appears false to me in at least some cases. I can hypothetically imagine future generations growing up without a concept of beauty and I wouldn't say their lives wouldn't be worth living as a result. But I kind of get what Danto's getting at here: I certainly think those generations lives would be worse off even if they wouldn't know it, because there is something compelling about beauty as both a concept and an experience. There's a good humanist argument hidden in here somewhere about why we should have beauty even if it's not "necessary", but Danto doesn't quite make it there amidst all his (admittedly impressive) historical overviews of past ideas of beauty and how they clash with and complement each other.

[E L K Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

As concepts of aesthetics move through the centuries and as people mostly know Aristotle and Kant I find it fascinating to move further and beyond to time, when the concept of beauty changes, at least in aesthetics, rapidly. Arthur C. Dantos piece on aesthetics of art and the concepts themselves is a piece every art student must read and every nerd should consider.

[Marlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Salvo que es un poquito repetitivo me ha gustado mucho.

Una pega seria sobre la edición española que he leído: me parece increíble publicar un libro sobre arte con apenas 4 fotos pequeñas en blanco y negro.

(Las pullas a Lyotard me hacen gracia ojalá más).

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book. Full of thoughts on beauty and its place in art.

A lot of repetition within.

[Elizabeth Siddal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una gran redefinición del papel de la belleza en el arte. Creía que iba a ser más denso filosóficamente, pero pasado el primer capítulo, la prosa es una delicia.

[Gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Danto and Beauty. Nothing better

[• Domeniko • · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.60

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent treatment of beauty in the philosophy of art. However, fails to mention Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas which I think would be appropriate.

[Carlos Pascual · Rating 5 out of 5]

El autor aborda la pérdida de la centralidad de la belleza en el arte en la cultura occidental, los distintos significados del concepto arte durante el proceso hasta la actualidad y los usos aproximados de los términos que ocultan, a veces, transformaciones de los paradigmas (por ejemplo, usar ¨bello¨ en lugar de ¨relevante¨ o ¨estéticamente llamativo¨). Muy recomendable.

[Iftekhar Mallick · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read it during my Undergraduate Psychology classes. It gave me some good insights to prepare my course project paper, "What is Beauty: I’ll Eat You Orange Lips".

[A L]

Very straightforward and insightful on the gulf between classical aesthetics and art after the 60s