The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [87]
Thorstein Veblen’s view of modern social life encroaches on aesthetic theory in ways that the modernist sensibility is bound to find uncomfortable. Kant set the direction for modern art-theoretical thinking explicitly wanting to expunge from “pure” aesthetic experience, as called it, such degrading factors as “finery,” mere ornamentation: “if ornamentation does not itself enter into the composition of the beautiful form—if it is introduced like a gold frame merely to win approval the picture by means of its charm—it is then called finery and takes away from the genuine beauty. “Kant even rejected as proper constituents of aesthetic form such values as color and emotion. His philosophical followers—through Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg up present—may not have gone that far, but they have continued to pure form as what counts in art and anything else as a mere cultural excrescence to be scraped off with the intellectual equivalent of a brush. Bell not only insisted that represented content was irrelevant aesthetic emotions remember pictures by their subjects; whereas people can, as often as not, have no idea what the subject of a picture They have never noticed the representative element, and so when they discuss pictures they talk about the shapes of forms and the relations quantities of colours.”
Have you ever met anyone who, having seen a painting, could only remember blue rectangles, green mottled areas, and pinkish brown smudges but couldn’t recall if they were cars or trees or people? Neither have I, but then Bell would just say that we move in the wrong circles. This loopy quotation—which describes people who “feel pure aesthetic emotions” as aphasics who might be entertainingly explained by Oliver Sacks—shows how far aesthetic formalism has been willing to go in trying to shame people out of admitting to such pleasures as enjoying represented content of a work of art.
Rejecting modernism’s tendency to scold naive taste, however, does not entail that we must champion the cause of pop ular values or embrace those aspects of the art world so cynically described by Veblen. Clive Bell knew painting much better than Veblen, and his wonderfully astute essays repay study by anyone who cares about art, even when their conclusions reduce to absurdity. While evolutionary psychology prehistoric economics nicely explain why someone would stroll through museum crassly remarking on how much the paintings are worth, they not justify such behavior. We are still entitled to teach our children that although the money of the art market and the beauty of art works connected, it is mainly the rare beauty of a Rembrandt portrait that causes it to be worth a lot of money, rather than its market price causing to be beautiful—that understanding immediate visual beauty is And that, yes, quite lovely jewelry can be made of materials more modest than gold and diamonds.
Still, if even to the smallest degree, rarity and expense add to beauty cheapness detracts from it, it is important that we understand this psychological fact, rather than deny it or try to pretend it is merely social. The familiar Müller-Lyer illusion is worth recalling in this respect. The two lines—one with arrow points at the ends, the other with the opening out from the ends of the line—look to be of different looks longer than the other. The “angles out” configuration corresponds the line being farther away, and our three-dimensional vision therefore insists on telling us that the line must be longer: our cognitive system evolved to make this jump in visual reasoning, and it will not denied. In the same way, we might be aware of how