Since Dave Hickey announced that “beauty” would re-enter conversation in the art world of the 1990’s¹, the debate on the necessity of teaching sensory aesthetics has grown in the American university. Although Hickey never defended beauty as a cure for the dissolution of post-WWII art education, his comment marks a turning point for those called to teach art and art history. A revival of beauty in the American university indicates a greater cultural movement for the pursuit of teaching art and art history based on belief and conviction, as opposed to the postmodern stance that disfavors sincere meaning and fights against principle-oriented and structure-based education. For beauty requires substance, and a teacher of beauty does not cherish endless criticism as mentioned in the article Art and Objecthood, where Michael Fried described the postmodern aesthetic as “endless the way a road might be.”² My paper strives to outline the context for the historic departure of beauty and to offer several modern and contemporary explanations of beauty. The paper will investigate significant advocates such as Meyer Schapiro, Frederick Turner, and Denis Dutton.

            To begin a defense of sensory aesthetics, I anchor the story of my own quest for beauty in the American university. In 1994, while defending a critique of my O’Keeffe-esque flower abstracts, paintings made for the completion of a Bachelor’s of Art at the Catholic University of Dallas, a teacher asked “why was I doing this, what was the purpose of my work?” I replied “to make beautiful objects” followed by a definition of beauty as something harmonious with pattern, focal points, color, and so on. I sauntered out of the undergraduate oasis, optimistic, thinking I was pursuing an intelligent endeavor with tangible rewards. After a few years, I entered the University of Texas at Dallas, where I majored in Humanities with a concentration in Aesthetics, a degree that incorporated studio art and loads of reading and writing. There I found two contenders. First, there was a faction who snorted sarcastic grunts at beauty and honored the terms post-modernism, deconstruction, and the edginess of conceptual and “context-driven” art. The other group, led by Fred Turner and Alex Argyros, taught that beauty had its roots in the brain, chaos theory, and fractals. In this context, beauty evolved from nature, evolution, and was considered a proponent against the “institutionalization” of art. Although the dualism of beauty advocates vs. post-modernists might seem awfully contradictive, I enjoyed the debate. As such, it makes sense that I quickly identified myself with another professor, Richard Brettell, an art historian of early Modern art, who encouraged me to read everything, both past and present. He taught me to navigate through the troubled waters of contemporary art by separating creative practice, art history, and art criticism. From Brettell, I learned as an artist or teacher, the most important rule is to foster all intense relationships between artist, audience, and art, no matter where one begins. After completing the Ph.D., I became an art history professor highly sensitive to the fiery debate.

            From the perspective of an artist, historian and professor, the story behind the dismantling of beauty in the visual arts began in the Romantic quest for the sublime and the re-evaluation of the function of art. Since Edmund Burke’s famous A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, many emphasized the significance of the aesthetic response in front of art that derived its effects from the experience of fear in the form of immense vastness, immeasurable spaces, and the sentiments of being small, yet not insignificant.³ In this context, the role of art was no longer to pursue beauty, a classical and figurative symbol of superior truth, but a social experience that challenged the viewer. This separation of beauty and sublime began the preference for art as provocateur against established aristocratic and bourgeois values. The ascendancy of the “sublime,” which relates with the arrival of the term “aesthetic,” indicated the role of aesthetic experience and departure from the physical and formal properties that constituted a work of art. Further, beauty seems to have become a scapegoat as nefarious symbol and means for the upper classes to condition society into a state of calmness and complacency. In order to make way for social progress and human liberty, narratives of art history set in the background beauty as a conservative and academic standard targeted by cultural movements fighting for public and private freedom.

            To fit in the story of art history, the crusade for social betterment needed a new face, and the terms the “sublime” and ”aesthetic” as detached response, as “disinterested,” as unbiased concept became the privileged emancipator versus the traditional hierarchy and oppression of beauty. The academic principles of order, clarity, harmony, decorum, balance, imitation, personal expression, skill—things that “condition” the sense of comfort and satisfy—entered into the target of social reformers who felt the new role of art was to create tension and conflict. Parenthetically, art history also became a supplier of visual rhetoric, as we see in the colossal influence on the discipline of art history from Hegel’s evolution of materialism to absolute spirit and Marx’s vision of an immaterial society with art as anti-status quo. Examples came be found by the outright omission of any theory of physical beauty and a privileging of anti-academic experimentation, conceptualism, and appropriation. Evidence of this is in nearly every textbook of art history, such as the well-known Arnason’s History of Modern Art, where very little space is given to the American Regionalists, making ample room for each European Early Modernist ending with the dominance of Conceptual, Video, and Postmodern art.⁴

            In step with the favoring of appropriation art, the attention of the famous Armory Show of 1913 has been rewarded as the most radical advancement of “modern” art, overshadowing the recent popularity of American Realism and the “Ashcan School.” The critics and artists who responded favorably to the unruly modern art of the Armory Show insisted that the show expressed more than the margins of accepted art, it revealed the current zeitgeist of progress in the new leaders Picasso, Duchamp, and Kandinsky. Similar to the departure from traditional academic values in Europe, the avant-garde of American artists preached the wholesale renunciation of traditional standards. The modernist approach prevailed in the hands of the Bauhaus’s emphasis on the removal of personal expression in the impersonal formal elements and the pictorial grid. As an established intelligentsia with a solid curriculum, the Bauhaus influenced many top administrators in American education to view art making as kind of scientific critical thinking. With the program of fundamental design classes along with art history and liberal arts courses, the American University propelled by the GI Bill and an increase of young men in search of white-collar professions, became a setting to teach and grant degrees for a scientific, functional, and social kind of art. The Bauhaus and its mission toward a modern theory of formal relationships (line, shape, space, color, etc.) as means to “problem solving” became the wellspring for the popularity of art in higher education. However, the Bauhaus advocated a sort of “rejecting one’s own personal identity as bourgeois false consciousness,”⁵ which relates to the power of the detached aesthetic. Under the aegis of social progress, the American University became a leading theater for the eventual endorsement of postmodern conceptualism, appropriation, and the new cult of the “ready-made.”

            Not only was the preference for impersonal selection as artistic method a result from the sublime as pure aesthetic response mixed with the patronage of the unprejudiced pictorial elements, it was the dismantling of the structure and syntax of language itself. Language, even in the most commonly uttered and understood words, became a subject for deconstruction as random associations with no meaning outside of social conditioning and hierarchies of power. Noam Chomsky’s beautiful structure of language is obliterated by Wittgenstein’s notion that language represents nothing more than its public use. The destruction of the integral nature of language migrates into the interpretation that pictures, the traditional carrier of beauty, function similarly as signs to shape and coerce identity for the self, gender, race, or for society.⁶ Coupled to the disbelief in the inherent meaning of words and images outside of social cause, Foucault’s elaborate narration of power and hierarchy as source of all identity and values influenced many American art professors to hesitate before sensory aesthetics.

            Yet the non-institutional and unconditional attraction toward beauty endured. The following three authors make up my daily defense for the teaching of beauty and sensory aesthetics, for they offer something the opponents cannot, a belief in the truth and universality of cross-cultural definitions.

            The art historian worthy of the highest accolades for establishing a criterion of beauty is Meyer Schapiro. Originally published in Art and Philosophy: A Symposium (1966) and then again in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (1998) ⁷, he advanced a list of reasonable and simple terms that define the qualities and conditions of beauty. After positing the requirement to see beyond stylistic categories, Schapiro located beauty in three terms: perfection, coherence, and, unity of form and content. Perfection is kind of congruity, harmony and order of a work. It instills the response of integrity and that this is the way it should be. Yet perfection does not necessarily indicate absolute consistency, and Shapiro gives examples, such as the Bible and Michelangelo’s murals of the Sistine Chapel, where discrepancies help create the immense complexity of the work. The second term, coherence, suggests the intrinsic order and grouping of distinct parts. But Schapiro urges the viewer not to forget that order can be found in the fusion of unstable and scattered parts. Hence, he expands the classical definition of order as symmetry and balance with the notion that works might be unstable and unpredictable. Schapiro’s third term is the unity of form and content, and the dismissal of this notion, in my opinion, is perhaps a central reason why the sensory world has been removed from the postmodern attitude. Since Shapiro’s notion combines the physical and the intellectual as mutually semiotic, attitudes and agendas outside the physical components are discredited. For Schapiro, who constructs the social fabric along with incredible formal examinations, an artwork’s content is expressed by its formal components; a work is an independent product within a continuum of belief and practice. In other words, any content, symbol, or social motivation outside the work must be bracketed away from the work if not expressed in the work. Hence the work does not live apart from the world or exist solely as manifestation of the social milieu. Understanding the content of the work must be an understanding of its form, its physical expression, and a close reading is necessary. Schapiro’s unity of form and content asks the viewer to look at the art, its context, and its meaning within the framework of creativity and technique.

            Another proponent of beauty is the maverick Fred Turner, the professor whose seminars I attended at the University of Texas at Dallas. Turner’s appreciation of beauty must be seen in the context of a general cultural movement to link beauty with the complex physicality of the brain. As an accomplished poet, his arguments express an individuality and lyrical flair that function as formal examples of the very cause he wishes to advance. In his work Beauty, the Value of Values, Turner links the biological aspects of beauty to the idea of shame, which ranges from an admittance of human frailty to the recognition of animal and human sacrifice.⁸ In addition, he also connects the dismissal of beauty to the modern political polarization of right vs. left. Ultimately, like Schapiro, Turner does not take us through labyrinthine arguments that spell out the meaninglessness of existence; he gives us real substance. He explains the special term, nerocharms, which are neuropeptides in the brain that create memory, promote immunity, give sexual readiness, and assist in the perception of time. With the recognition of these nerocharms, we see the physical attraction of works of art as a kind of reflexive feedback system that offers reward and stimulation. Turner divides the nerocharms into groups, three of which are the language, the musical, and the visual, and within the latter, he discusses patterns and fractal theory, color, and visual representation. These terms are discussed in the context of neurological function as argument against the postmodern condemnation of the beauty of pattern, color, and mimesis. Any disciple of the beauty and the brain movement should read his involved explanation of patterns as instinctual and rhythmic means of visual hierarchy, fractals and the Fibonacci series, the pleasure of color, and the primordial skill of representation.

            The final defender of beauty, Dennis Dutton, ushers a lengthy and clear explanation of art as a fundamental drive for the human condition. In The Art Instinct, he relates the worldwide preference of certain kinds of landscape in calendars and posters to a six million year old inherited desire to dwell in the savannahs, a place of low growing brush with ample water, fertile fields, and protective hills.⁹ Art, essentially a synonym for beauty, is derived from survival and communication. Similar to Turner’s reading, he pits the instinct to make art against the postmodern attitude of art as purely conditioned, and he wishes to build interdisciplinary bridges between evolution, psychology, art, and the humanities.

            The mainstay of Dutton’s attack is on the institutional theory art of Arthur Danto, who although philosophized on the significance of beauty, remained in the limits of postmodernism. Like the disbelievers of meaning in images, Danto’s philosophy appears to caution or back off from any claims of universality, and it is a perpetual relativism that Dutton’s book breaks down. To this end, Dutton establishes a list of “what is art,” including direct pleasure, skill and virtuosity, criticism, intellectual challenge, art traditions and institutions, and imaginative experience. Following chapters on natural selection, fiction, and self-domestication, he places a reading of Duchamp’s work in a chapter entitled “Invention, Forgery, and Dada: Three Aesthetic Problems,” where he locates the ready-made within and without each of the above categories of art. Dutton’s explanation of Duchamp challenges most art history, in that, he counters the prevailing response that Duchamp represents the center of advanced art. For Dutton and art as instinct, Duchamp and Warhol are witty and marginal figures and should be seen as such, artists that inspired critical dialogue on the boundaries of art.

            Dutton’s claim of art as instinct takes a surprising turn toward traditional aesthetics in his revival of Immanuel Kant’s notion that art exists in the theater of the imagination. As Dutton’s explains, “for Kant, works of art are imaginative objects subject to disinterested contemplation. All art, in this way, happens in a make-believe world.”¹⁰ His interpretation of Kant is a direct critique on Greenberg’s idea that “disinterested-ness” referred to the purity of the picture plane and the autonomy of the creative act. My opinion is that Greenberg formalism separated art from the outside world, and as an independent self-referential unit was therefore detached and isolated. Although Greenberg’s aesthetic promoted experimentation and personal expression, he overlooked the biological function of the imagination and hence, provoked a generation to fight against formalism and purity, and place art at the service of social debate and self-identity.

            My closing remarks build off Dutton’s revisit to Kant’s art as “imaginative experience for both producers and audiences”.¹¹ His interpretation urges us to re-evaluate the notion “formalism” as about properties with biological associations. Hence, there exists a direct and decent connection between world and art. Art historians have given us a great variety of intrinsic perspectives and my defense of beauty is corroborated by a defense of the various sorts of formalism. Examples are in the brilliant writings of Henri Focillon, Heinrich Wolfflin, Alois Riegl, and Erwin Panofsky. These scholars base their interpretations on direct experience along with open-minded cultural opinions.

 Works Cited

1. David Hickey, “Enter the Dragon,” The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993).

2.  Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood. 143-144.

3. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757.

4. H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Photography. Fifth Edition. Peter Kalb, revising Author (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 2004).

5. Frederick Turner, Beauty, The Value of Values (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 78.

6. Theodore L. Prescott, Editor, and Gordon Fuglie, One Hundred Years of Attitudes (Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) of Broken Beauty

7. Bill Beckley, editor, with David Shapiro, Uncontrollable Beauty, Toward a New Aesthetics. Meyer Schapiro, On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content. (New York, New York: Allworth Press, School of Visual arts, 1998).

8. Frederick Turner, Beauty, The Value of Values (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 78.

9. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct, Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. (Bloomsbury Press, New York: 2009).

10. Ibid., p. 58

11. Ibid., p. 58