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March 31, 2006
Art: a personal choice
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, says prof.
MONIKA ULLMANN
Vancouver has always been a city where artists outnumber art lovers,
so when the well-known artist and founder of Artists in our Midst,
Pnina Granirer, decided to host a couple of Philosophers' Cafés
devoted to discussions of post-modernism and beauty, she wasn't
sure it would fly.
"I'm surprised and pleased to see so many people here,"
she said in her opening address on the second night when, just as
on the first night, close to 40 people showed up at Aberthau Community
Centre. But it soon became clear that discussing art, post-modernism
and beauty isn't for the faint of heart and can get extremely complicated.
The discussions were wide-ranging, illuminating and had all the
earmarks of a true philosophical conversation.
University of British Columbia English professor Graham Good began
his presentation on Beauty in Post-Modern Art with a series of slides
– and continued with examples of traditional definitions of
art – a transformative encounter between self and the world
or "imagination realized in an image or object," leading
directly to the knotty issue of how to define beauty. Good said
that in the modern mind, it's nothing to do with what is pretty
or even pleasant and he quoted poets like Yeats ("a terrible
beauty is born") and Rilke ("beauty is simply the onset
of terror") to illustrate his point.
A short history of the idea of beauty in art followed. Good explained
that beauty wasn't a controversial issue with the Greeks or in Renaissance
art; it only became a "problem" some time after the mid-20th
century.
"Something changed after the '50s," Good observed. "We
saw a weakened belief in the creative imagination of the individual,
which raises the question of whether this old idea can survive in
the modern institutional matrix."
This question – whether beauty in its traditional definition
can survive or even flourish in today's art world – was the
unifying theme of not just this evening but the previous one as
well. Good's analysis of the intellectual, social and political
underpinnings of post-modern art provided a solid framework for
the discussion that followed.
He said that one of the things that has happened to art is that
the definition of what art does has shifted from "transformation"
to "transposition," where an image is simply positioned
in a different context instead of being transformed by the creative,
imagination of the artist doing the work.
Good cited some examples of this trend: the well-known Andy Warhol
images of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe, repeated over and over,
for instance – or a tapestry showing a Time magazine
cover. He suggested that artworks no longer have intrinsic qualities
and must cross boundaries, must be daring in some way. We've gone
from the "shock of the new" to the "shock of the
nude," he said, in that the artist often uses his or her own
naked form instead of a model and, quite often, the requirements
of this type of art can lead the artist to do something quite pornographic,
such as masturbating in public. This actually has happened, and
showing just how seriously such exhibitionism is taken is the apparent
collusion of art critics.
Other aspects of post-modernism are the cult of personality, in
which the creator has morphed into a celebrity, the belief that
originality is a delusion and a turning away from the object towards
events, happenings or interventions. Post-modern art has become
an exhibition of modern lifestyles as a kind of cabinet of curiosities,
or perhaps, horrors.
Some of the discussions revolved around how all of this goes on
with the blessing and support of the official public galleries and
critics, art schools and collectors. But, people wondered, what
about ordinary folks who just want to have some art on their walls?
It turns out that this is a completely different world, as anyone
who has ventured into private local galleries can attest. They are
bursting at the seams with accessible, technically proficient and
even "beautiful" work that actually sells.
As Granirer pointed out, rumors that "painting is coming back"
are idiotic – painting has never left and neither has the public
hunger for it. Online auctions and auctions in general are thriving,
as are many local galleries. People should have the courage of their
taste, said Granirer, and never mind what the art establishment
says.
Artists in our Midst, featuring tours of artists' studios, runs
for three weeks, and kicks off with a preview at Aberthau on Friday,
April 21.
Monika Ullmann is a freelance writer and editor living
in Vancouver. She can be reached at [email protected].
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