Jesse Waugh

“ Just as he can rationally assign relativity to beauty if he so chooses. Both are logical stances which may superficially resemble opinions, but in fact can be entirely rational deductions. It is therefore within reason for me to assert the absolute position of Beauty as the purpose of art. Any argument against such a stance would be irrational.
Humanity has had centuries to come to a holistic understanding of the dynamics involved in the interplay between light and dark – they do not exist without each other, and if they can exist independently – to what avail? ”

“ Regardless of whatever hate any self-appointed, pseudo-avantgarde, mock-intelligentsia might hurl at Beauty in its place as the Purpose of Art, they are destined to fail. Humanity has finally divested itself of the hoodwink under which it suffered ugly, foul, negative, nightmarishly wrong, degenerate art in the 20th century. ”

“ At that point some sort of Divine command issued forth at me and I remember deciding to myself, in the deepest core of my being, that I would LIVE FOR BEAUTY. I decided that moment to dedicate my life to attempting to communicate Beauty. It has become the purpose of my life."
I shall here interject some personal notes from my journals in order to illustrate my experience in attempting to freely adhere to the tenets of Pulchrism and practice my art accordingly:
Far from being rigid or dogmatic, I have methodically placed Beauty at the forefront of my industry. ”

“ It raises us up, comforts, inspires, thrills, takes us out of ourselves to the sublime and the sacred; it also challenges, disturbs, discomforts and brings us to the most unlikely and unexpected places of death and destruction.
Some find no beauty in life, or claim they are unable to see the beautiful any more. ”

“ The truth is that human beings have a natural ability to recognize beauty and contrast it with ugliness – in exactly the same way that they can differentiate between light and dark. Beauty is not relative, but identifiable, and to be celebrated. All that has happened during the past century or so is that ugliness has been hoisted up onto the pedestal formerly occupied by Beauty. ”

“ Pulchrism is not traditional or modern. It is timeless. Pulchrism advocates that Beauty is not relative, but recognizable. Pulchrism is absolutist in that it holds that Beauty is not solely in the eye of the beholder, but usually contains fundamental traits such as satisfying proportion, exalted color, dynamic chiaroscuro, or preternatural inspiration. Pulchrism can include the precepts of computational aesthetics wherever required. Pulchrism takes the stance that Beauty can be identified, recognized, and agreed upon. Pulchrism places precedence on Beauty above all other qualities in art. ”

“ Beauty and ugliness must be maintained as separate phenomena, and cannot be transposed by art relativists and subjectivists, if dynamism – not one-sided puritanism – is to prevail and make art beautiful.
Here is the crux of the problem of relativism: If everything is art, then nothing is art. If nothing is art, then everything is art. If everything is beautiful, then nothing is beautiful. If nothing is beautiful, then everything is beautiful. ”

“ Why would the government encourage and even orchestrate the production of modern art? The Independent article goes on to state that "this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete." ”

“ That irony so widely celebrated in the Anglosphere as being the antidote to Old World hyper-ornamentation with its hokey and sentimental decorative excess, has itself become backwards, retrograde, passé, hokey, suburban, common, provincial, philistine – it's even become a nostalgic, sentimental reaction to the uncertainty of the New Age which is dawning and threatens to sweep away many 20th century fixtures such as Modernism, Conceptualism, etc. The irony game is over but its dogmatists are clinging onto it for dear life.
Beauty is not ugly. ”

“ This is the awful (though not awesome) conundrum we find ourselves in at the end of the Modern era: we find ourselves worshiping death, rather than the dynamo constructed by the thrilling natural opposition of beautiful life contrasted with terrifying death – chiaroscuro only exists where there is also light present. ”

“ A fundamental precept of pulchrism is that Beauty transcends both relativity and absolutism. Pulchrism encompasses The Cult of Beauty, while adhering to its stipulations. One of pulchrism's foremost tenets is that ugliness must be categorized as separate from Beauty. Ugliness called Beauty is anathema to pulchrism. According to the pulchrist doctrine, relativist confounding of Beauty with ugliness destroys Beauty. Art elitists argue that only philistines cannot see Beauty in ugliness. ”

“ The marketed controversy as to the purportedly precarious nature and validity of beauty in art, versus ugly degeneration in art, has been nothing more than an artificial dialectic foisted on the gullible masses by social engineers who seek to propagandize people into believing that beauty and ugliness are indiscernible from one another. ”

“ A century ago, beauty was almost unanimously considered the supreme purpose of art and even synonymous with artistic excellence. Yet today beauty has come to be viewed as an aesthetic crime. Artists are now chastised by critics if their works seem to aim at beauty. ”

“ But something tells me that if I go to that conference and state my sincere belief that Beauty is objective and absolute, I will be crucified by relativists who only give the slightest lip-service to the possibility that the 20th century excommunication of Beauty might have been a giant, colossal mistake, and I will also be ostracized for behaving in any sort of an assertive, masculine manner, which behaviour will be seen as suspect and potentially dangerous. ”

“ Many Hindus would argue that Kali or Durga worship brings them closer to god. Let’s accept this for the sake of argument and ponder what the varying forms of Hindu immolation – which tend to result from the veneration of death and destruction embodied in deities such as Durga – might achieve: Do they achieve sublimation? Is total destruction sublime? By definition it cannot be, as it actually destroys its participant. The sublime can be terrifying, but once it crosses the line into actual destruction it kills its audience. ”

“ Pulchrism is a New Beauty which offers a simple, intuitive solution to the now very dated question of the definition of what is beautiful: Beauty is objective. Beauty can be decided upon by individuals and by consensus. Beauty can be seen by masses of people who instinctively agree upon it. Beauty is only relative to sick, dishonest or gullible minds. ”

“ It is entertaining reading the description of this conference, as it seems to go out of its way to include ugliness and death as being part of beauty, but these glaring attempts at asserting relativist subjectivity only succeed at emphasizing the awkwardness of shoving the polar opposites of beauty and ugliness together into an uncomfortable, repulsive, falsely-fused dichotomy, which causes cognitive dissonance in any healthy mind. Witness the following:
We see beauty; we experience beauty; we think beautiful words, beautiful thoughts. ”

“ In other words, according to Newman, beauty as an invention can be dismissed as an abstract artifice. Newman and his ilk were reacting to what they perceived to be pious veneration of artificial constructs of beauty by artists and philosophers in centuries preceding theirs. But they were also being funded by what could be perceived as nefarious agenda-laden forces who had designs on beauty and were also working against figurativeness in art. ”

“ Not everyone will agree on everything, but most will agree that certain things are beautiful: flowers, sunsets, stars, waterfalls, butterflies, the healthy human body, etc. Frankly anyone who cannot see beauty in these things is mistaken or incapacitated in one way or another. ”

“ Attracting support among a fashionable stream of English upper and middle-class society between the 1870s and 1890s, it promoted the supremacy of beauty and the notion of 'art for art's sake', a philosophy that often spilled over into the kind of hedonism characterized in the lives of the playwright Oscar Wilde and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. It was in fact a Frenchman, the poet Theophile Gautier, who coined the phrase 'l'art pour l'art' when discussing Symbolist poetry, but it was in England that this religion of beauty was most widely applied to the visual arts. ”

“ I have found that the medium employed is only one variable, and that any resulting beauty can arise more or less independently of whatever given media might have been used. Film does seem to give me an edge in achieving some sort of beauty which can be commonly recognized as beautiful, and I think it is because of the immediacy of film — you get instant results — and also perhaps because I have been practicing with that particular medium for more than twenty years. ”

“ No, I don't think my assertions would be welcome at all, as they would only serve to threaten the entrenched and now fossilized counter-intuitive subjectivist dogma that Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and that there can never be any valid consensus which would prove otherwise – i.e., that there may be even the slightest something objective about Beauty. According to the new status quo, ugliness is only a relative form of Beauty ”

“ In other words, like a Puritan who has tried his hardest to rid the world of evil, Hirst has focused on trying to rid the world of life, although his use of butterflies might be considered a sort of penance to make up for all his sad morbidity, if there is indeed any sincerity in any of his art. ”

“ And this is an excellent point which has also been stated by my academic mentor Helen Kennedy: their simply must be some agreement amongst people in general that the sun setting over the sea is beautiful. Does this not suggest some sort of objectivity to beauty? If so, then how can beauty be entirely subjective, as is enforced as a concept by so many practitioners of art in our current era? ”

“ Pulchrism's detractors have created a situation in which those who advocate the objectivity of Beauty are immediately sent to a psychological concentration camp for the politically incorrect. Thankfully, this ludicrous and highly illogical, not to mention disturbingly unintelligent, anti-beauty mass hysteria is coming to an end because the tide is turning. ”

“ But it has to have merit if life is to have value. Otherwise we live in pure relativity, with no meaning.
Furthermore: If everything is relative, then nothing is relative. If everything is subjective, then nothing is subjective. For subjectivity to exist, there must be objectivity. And straight to the point: If relativity is to exist, then there must be an absolute. Any other line of thinking is logical fallacy.
Therefore it stands to reason that a given individual can rationally assign an absolute position to Beauty as the purpose of art. ”

“ How does beauty inform the way we cultivate personal relationships and experience love and romance? How does it shape our values and our perceptions of the broad spectrum of human creativity? What is at stake when we talk about art, literature, film or music in terms of beauty? [29]
The writers of this pitch dance around their own relativity dogma like butterflies on fire. And then they go on to state "The Making Sense of Beauty conference seeks to explore these questions in an inclusive environment that welcomes participants from all disciplines, professions and vocations. ”

“ In the past few years, however, some artists, critics, and curators have begun to give beauty another look. The resulting discussion is often confused, with arts pundits sometimes seeing beauty as a betrayal of the artist’s authentic role, other times working hard to find beauty in the apparently grotesque or disgusting." [1]
When beauty is brought up as a subject in the context of higher education, it is striking just how far those supposedly benefitting from higher education will go to excommunicate beauty from its natural place in art. ”