Jesse Waugh

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fortunately, we have solid historical records of the mid-19th century art movement which overtly championed the creation of beauty as the noblest human endeavour, and as the highest human ideal: the Aesthetic Movement. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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? ”

“ From 1995, up until I attended the Masters of Fine Art programme at the University of Brighton, in Southeast England, in 2014–15, I had never actually encountered individuals in person who were drastically opposed to the notion that Beauty should be the purpose of art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His point is that true critical thinking is not actually allowed in conceptual art venues, because if it were, virtually none of the "art" on display could possibly be seen to have any real merit.
My favourite quote from Allan Ramsay is: "People don't plant ugly flowers." He makes a good point when he asks "Why do people come to Brighton Beach?" ”