The Beauty of Non-Objective Art?
Non-objective art can be very exciting and intriguing, but can it be called “beautiful?” People often speak of a beautiful painting, a beautiful play, or a beautiful piece of music and traditionally the goal of art has often been to create something beautiful. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century the interest in beauty as a goal of art decreased, and this decrease coincided with the appearance of non-objective art. Creating something beautiful was not necessarily the goal of making non-objective art.
An often heard phrase is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It seems to be true only to a certain extent because if beauty were in the eye of the beholder alone, then what is it about certain famous paintings that has most of us agreeing that they are beautiful? If so many people agree, is the beauty not a feature of those paintings? Are those paintings not objectively beautiful in that case?
Philosophers have grappled to understand whether beauty is a property of the object or a property of subjective experience. Classical philosophers believed that beauty was objective: they thought that certain orderly proportions and relations among parts were what made objects beautiful. Take for example the golden ratio. It is thought that art that contains a golden ratio of approximately 1:1.6 as part of its composition is more aesthetically pleasing than art that does not. Even though this idea is ancient, it is known to, and at times used by, artists and students today.
Among classical philosophers, Plato and Plotinus had an Idealist conception of beauty: they thought that beauty does not reside in ratios among parts but in something akin to a spiritual unity, which belongs to the realm of ideas. According to Plato, the imperfect, ever changing world that we experience is just an echo, or a shadow, of an ideal world that is perfect and eternal. Beauty belongs to the ideal world. Representational art, in that view, is an imperfect copy of our imperfect world.
But could Plato and Plotinus have found beauty in non-objective art? I would say that their ideas about beauty relate surprisingly well to non-objective art. Given that non-objective art considers only form and other simple elements of the painting itself, we can be sure that if there is beauty to be found it is only there because of its form and the relationship between those elements. If we merely go by their philosophies of beauty, it seems that finding beauty in non-objective art should have been no problem for Plotinus or Plato as long as the ratios and forms in the art were close to ideal. That is, if they would consider it art at all; more on this at another time.
An alternative conception of beauty that locates beauty in the eye of the beholder, is the 18th century hedonist conception. According to hedonists beauty is that which gives us pleasure. The hedonists put an emphasis on experience, not so much on objective properties of whatever gives us this experience. When we consider non-objective art in this light, it can be either ugly or beautiful, depending on the viewer’s taste.
Viewers who are puzzled by non-objective art, and don’t like it at all, can rest assured according to the more recent philosophers: if you don’t experience any pleasure from looking at certain paintings, it is not because you are failing to see the beauty that the painting objectively possesses. No, feel free to just put it aside as ugly and uninteresting.
What a relief.
