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Is there a Standard for Beauty

Jonathan Wilner

Blog #7 of 8

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August 15th, 2015 - 12:34 PM

Is there a Standard for Beauty

We all have differing preferences for fashion or the lack thereof, the interiors of our homes, and works that possess little utility namely art.
But no single standard governs our views, prejudices, and sentiments. This is what the museum goer encounters. In one building there is classical sculpture that laid the foundation for proportion. .And then in another building are the dark sometimes dreary portraits that exhibit the mastery of chiaroscuro from the dramatic scenes of Caravaggio to the contemplative ones of Rembrandt. And then down the hall are the French Impressionists and in another wing American painters ranging from the Romantics through modernist realism of the likes of Edward Hopper. But then the visitor enters another building with strange sometimes contorted images of surrealists' works and then oddities such as a lacquered rope suspended from the ceiling or a Jasper Johns American flag painting. Many of the two-dimensional work are a series of dots on a blank canvas or smears of pigment tracing amoebic shapes on a flat surface.

What has happened to the standard for beauty? The artist has moved away, far away from the conventions imposed by the Medieval and Renaissance periods. What standard can be applied to a Jackson Pollack or a Mark Rothko?

We now live in a world where the sole determinant for resolving this question is the viewer who looks and judges and looks some more comparing one work and one style against that of another. Sometimes he or she will relate an artist's painting to that of another author or style or school categorizing a landscape by Julian Onderdonk as impressionist or judging it to be under the shadow of his mentor William Merritt Chase. But then there are viewers who ignore the urge to judge and simply allow the work to enter his or her soul. This is how I had encountered Picasso's Guernica. Not knowing the context in which it was created, this work spoke to me or rather sung to me in what seemed to my imagination as electronically synthesized vibration. This piece was so intense that it was nearly heard.. Its meaning was not in the tragedy of this Basque town nor as an expression of outrage but in its vibratory lines that for me at that time told me an inchoate story -- one with no end except for the borders of the actual work. Its meaning as with abstract work was for me found upon the ground's surface.

Perhaps we are living in an age, call it modernist or post-modernism wherein lies the opportunity to encounter a painting, sculpture, or an installation as it is wholly given over to the viewer its meaning not locked away in metaphors but found there conflated with or folded into the body of work. Then, we have only to encounter it leaving by the door before we enter the gallery our prejudices.

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