An article from the Guardian titled Why Modern Art is All in the Mind reviews Paul Bloom’s upcoming book called How Pleasure Works. Two quotes in the article caught my attention.

In developing his general theory about how humans decide what they like or dislike, he lines up evidence to show that what people believe about a work of art is crucial to the way they feel about it. He goes on to suggest that modern art collectors are partly motivated by the way they wish to be seen by the rest of the world.

And then this.

Humans are incapable of just getting pleasure from the way something looks, he argues. “The history of an artwork is absolutely critical, although you might argue that it shouldn’t be. It is just the way our minds are built.”

Mammatus overhead from mid-June.

On first read I have a very hard time — thinking about myself — believing that humans are incapable of getting pleasure from the way something looks. However, I regularly talk about the importance of associations in how works of art are interpreted, how they’re viewed. Does that mean, however, that something can’t give pleasure on viewing without certain history does it? The associations I refer to are more or less the same thing as making history a prerequisite to pleasure.

It’s hard for me to imagine not liking the structure in a storm over the prairie, the colors on it as the sun sets, the many shades of purple the clouds are tinged with as lightning courses through it after dark. Yes,I have a history with storms but going back to my childhood it isn’t a positive one. I was scared to death of them until I was about twelve years old. How I came to love them is a mystery even to me.

What about flowers? Why do we consider, pretty much universally (right?) flowers beautiful? We may not all like the same ones, and guys may claim to not like them at all in a pretentious and ignorant show of masculinity.

I suppose Bloom’s book explains a good deal more of his research and theories than the article lets on, but I’d also guess that it won’t necessarily quell in me what suggests that there is some sort of innate [Divinely appointed] basis for beauty.

This is another excerpt, courtesy of David Taylor’s blog, from the up and coming For the Beauty of the Church. She applies a few terms from a Thomas Aquinas quote regarding beauty that I’m still processing.

THE ARTIST & THE TERRAIN OF BEAUTY

THE NATURE OF BEAUTY
Thomas Aquinas gave a definition of the beautiful that is still helpful and relevant seven centuries later. The beautiful, he said, is “wholeness, harmony, and radiance,” and these define the terrain of the artist.

WHOLENESS
Wholeness means nothing is missing. All parts are present, suggesting completeness. No one looks at the Pietà and says, “You know, Mary needs just a little more fringe around her veil. Oh well.” Or, people don’t listen to Mozart’s Ave Verum and say, “Needs another high G in there. Oh well.” There’s something about these works that suggest completeness. Wholeness also means there is nothing extra, nothing gratuitous that isn’t an essential part of the whole. Isn’t that one of the primary complaints about so many movies? “Gratuitous sex and violence.” That is, too often there is no context for these things in a project, so it feels to the audience like they were just slapped in there to try and distract from some flaw in the storytelling. A beautiful work has nothing gratuitous . . .

WHAT THE TERRAIN OF THE BEAUTIFUL IS NOT

POLITICAL
The first thing we’ve done to wreck art is make it serve the political instead of the beautiful. I don’t necessarily meaning left or right, but statement-making, which is an utter perversion of the concept of radiance. The goal of statement-making is to manipulate, to coerce, to get people to vote a certain way, to propagandize, to merely change behavior.

I can’t think of a better example of this than in the awful statue of Mary that stands over the outside door of the $200 million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. It’s just dreadful. The statue is of completely uncertain gender, with a female torso, but harshly cropped hair and distinctly masculine arms and hands. In fact, my students call her, “Man-hands Mary.” But it’s worse than just androgyny. The image has black lips, Asian eyes, a Latino face, and other scattered Anglo features. When I first went on a tour of the new Cathedral, our guide said, “This statue was conceived so that people of all races would see themselves in it and feel welcome in this place.” And I said, “But it’s kind of ugly. I don’t know about you, but if you saw that kind of freak inviting you into its house. . . .” Well, the tour guide sniffed at me, waved her hand, and said, “The church is not about that anymore.”

It begs the question of whether Japanese people really do look at the Pietà in Rome and shrug, “Well, that’s okay for the white people.” But my point is that the goal of the statue was not to make something that would deliver the beautiful. The goal of the statue was to communicate a political message. The fact that it is ugly and makes my students mock it indicates that it has been a failure as a political vehicle too. In politics, you lose wholeness because the political only tells its own side of the story. As a result, people lose a feeling of rest.

Pre-order For the Beauty of the Church on Amazon.com.

What ought to be?

That is the International Arts Movement‘s way of asking a question that has partly driven my artistic philosophy for ten years now. I was never able to put it in such succinct terms, however. I usually talked about original creation, what the world looked and acted like before the Fall. IAM’s more concise phrase is a much better jumping off point.

A few months ago I was thinking about photography, a media we all love as long as we’re the ones behind the lens, a technology that seems to capture every wrong moment in time if the lens is pointed towards us. Recently I’ve been working more and more with video. Interlaced in all of the footage lie a myriad of embarrassing gestures. Without this technology though, most of us never see the contorted nature of our countenance midstream. Before the advent of the camera, we were more in control of our image.

Is there something about our dislike of seeing ourselves, especially when we don’t look our best, that relates back to the way things ought to be? Do we possess some kind of internal aesthetic editor that is still faintly yet immutably calibrated to a world before the Fall?

Image by Derek Jensen from Wikipedia.