Recovering an Objective Standard of Beauty
Jens Haaning’s most popular work of art is a blank canvas. If you’ve never heard of him, you’re not alone–he’s a relatively obscure modern artist from Denmark, who made waves in the art industry for his latest work. Haaning was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, to complete a work of art for $84,000 dollars. Upon completion of the job, he delivered two totally blank canvases to the museum, in a work he titled “Take the Money and Run.”
This is not the first case of a silly modern art stunt fetching an exorbitant price. In 2019, artist Maurizio Cattelan created a work entitled Comedian, better known in popular culture as the “banana taped to a wall” piece. Cattelan duct-taped an actual banana to a wall and sold it for $120,000. To put that in perspective, $120,000 is enough to buy a 975 square foot home at the average price per square foot in the United States today. Regardless of one’s speculations about the intended meaning of the piece or the motivations of the artist, when people start paying six figures for “art” that can be replicated at home with a roll of tape and a 5-cent banana, something has gone wrong.
Stories like these and others are good for a laugh, and they usually cause a minor wave in the news before fading away. But they also raise interesting questions about the ultimate ends of art itself. Many of us have been to a modern art exhibition and scoffed, looking at paint splattered randomly on canvas and thinking “a six year old could do that.” At the same time, art has historically been a medium for intricate design and incredible beauty– think of classical works by Michelangelo and DaVinci, or the impressionism of Claude Monet. Even today, many artists engage in the active pursuit of meaningful beauty. However, the postmodern movement– with its emphasis on the deconstruction of all categories –has created an art landscape where anything can be anything; where a blank canvas or a banana taped to a wall can be art of deep significance. This no-rules perspective may look like freedom, but it robs us of an ability to appreciate true beauty that is central to the human experience.
Defining Beauty
Beauty is notoriously difficult to define. It is often said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” that beauty itself is a subjective matter of personal preference. However, the idea that beauty is objective–that there are real standards by which we can tell whether or not something is beautiful–is deeply rooted in philosophical tradition. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, argues that humans naturally ascribe a meaning to beauty that goes beyond mere preference:
If [someone] pronounces that something is beautiful, then he expects the very same satisfaction of others: he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Hence he says that the thing is beautiful, and does not count on the agreement of others… but rather demands it from them.
In other words, claims of beauty are normative statements. Something is beautiful not because I believe it to be beautiful, but because it is beautiful by its very nature. According to Kant, such judgements about beauty are intended to have a “universal validity.”
This raises an important question: by what criteria are judgements of beauty valid or not valid? In his seminal work Summa Theologica, the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas answers this question by providing what he takes to be the three central elements of beauty: integritas, consonantia, and claritas, which roughly translate to wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Understanding these three elements is central to a meaningful appreciation of beauty, and therefore of art itself.
Integritas, or wholeness, refers to the idea that beauty requires completeness. For something to be beautiful, it must not lack anything that is essential to its nature. Think of a movie: it is composed of many elements, including writing, acting, cinematography, lighting, sound design (with the exception of silent films), and editing, all of which work together to make a beautiful film. For a film to be truly beautiful, it cannot lack any of these essential elements. The Godfather is a classic film because it has excellent cinematography and stellar acting from Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro (among others). Neither element can carry the film without the other. The Godfather is great because it includes all the essential elements of a quality film, lacking nothing.
The second element, consonantia, is closely related to integritas. It refers to the idea of proportionality, or harmony between different parts. In art, this is the idea that the proportions of a work of art must be well-balanced. The different elements work together to create the whole. Anyone who has ever over-salted a plate of food knows the importance of harmony– by adding too much of one element, you diminish all the others. With consonantia, the many elements of a work of art can become more than the sum of their parts. Without it, art quickly becomes gaudy and unpleasant.
The final element of beauty is claritas, or radiance. Radiance refers to the inherent appeal of something beautiful. Think of a great work of architecture, like the Notre Dame cathedral, compared to your local Walmart. The beauty of Notre Dame’s architecture– its intricate stained glass, beautiful arches, columns, and spires, and its iconic silhouette –draws visitors in by the millions in a way that the stark, utilitarian design of a big box store never could. A thing of true beauty captures our attention and imagination because it is beautiful, not because of what it can do for us or what price it will fetch at an auction.
Why Beauty Matters
Oscar Wilde once proclaimed that “all art is quite useless.” He meant this as a compliment: beautiful art frees us from the utilitarian structures of commerce, exchange, and productivity that dominate our day-to-day existence. As the philosopher Roger Scruton put it in his documentary Why Beauty Matters,
[Beautiful objects] liberate us from the tyranny of the useful, and satisfy our need for harmony. In a strange way… they remind us that we have more than just practical needs, we are not just governed by animal appetites like eating and sleeping. We have spiritual and moral needs too, and if those needs go unsatisfied, so do we.
In this way, beautiful things point us towards that which is most distinctively human: our faculties of reason and morality that set us apart from other species. Paradoxically, it is the inherent uselessness of beauty that makes it most necessary.
The postmodern movement, in its emphasis on moral relativism and the supremacy of the individual, has largely abandoned any attempt at objective beauty. We elevate ironic artistic statements like Hanning’s blank canvases and Cattelan’s banana because they are all we have left in a world that no longer cares for meaningful conceptions of value. This is a shame, because truly beautiful art has the ability to bring us outside of our own narrow perspectives, and to contemplate something greater than ourselves. In the words of the 20th-century theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, beauty is “the disinterested one,” in “a world of interests.” To contemplate beauty is to recognize that there is more to life than survival instincts and base appetites.
In Closing
True beauty is central to the human experience. It draws us in by its radiance and, through its completeness and harmony, can be many things: a window to the past, a mirror through which to analyze ourselves, and an aspirational call towards that which is most true and good. It is foolhardy to abandon this pursuit wholesale and argue that art is nothing more than a function of our base instincts. I do not wish to disparage all modern artists, nor to curmudgeonly claim that “the kids today” are ruining everything. However, a culture’s values are reflected in its art, and the art landscape of the past half-century shines a revealing light on the failure of the postmodern ethos. Radical individualism and relativism drain art of its capacity for beauty, and therefore of its capacity to transcend the ordinary and offer real meaning. By recommitting ourselves to the value of beauty, we can recover a much-needed sense of the “useless,” and a more robust appreciation of what it means to be human.