When my recent Commonweal article on art and attention, “Fix Your Gaze,” was in the editing stage, I had a nagging thought: “You haven’t said anything about beauty. Art is about beauty. Good art is beautiful. You’re getting everything wrong, you dummy.”
I briefly considered saying at the end that on a visit to an art museum, “You will have viewed and enjoyed beautiful works,” but in the end I went with, “You will have viewed and enjoyed works of human hands.” I thought that line would be truer to what I had been saying all throughout the essay, and one should not introduce new concepts in one’s final paragraph.
The nagging thoughts about beauty are still with me. But I think I have an answer to them.
First, though, I want to tell you that Commonweal produced a one-page discussion guide to accompany the essay. Maybe you would like to discuss the essay with your friends, students, or church group? The guide is there to help.
OK, back to beauty.
Here’s the reason I didn’t use the word “beauty” or “beautiful” even once in my essay. The reason is, I don’t think the claim, “this is beautiful,” adds much, if anything, to our understanding of an artwork. (I’ll pause here to give you time to unsubscribe.)
Maybe an example will help explain what I mean. This fall, I went to the Dallas Opera’s productions of “La Traviata” and “Pelleas and Melisande.” They were beautiful! Truly. I was frequently overcome and elevated by the beauty of the performances.
But think about it: Do you know more about these works at the end of that paragraph than you did at the beginning? Were you on the edge, awaiting my judgment and breathe a sigh of relief when I declared them beautiful? Did you think that maybe I thought Verdi and Debussy created something ugly? Or that the musicians and singers colossally botched it? I doubt it. So what is gained when I do say the operas were beautiful?
My saying they were beautiful is partly a consequence of my limitations. What else can I, an opera idiot, say? I lack a better vocabulary. I’m working on it, for sure, but I’ve only been to I think nine operas in my lifetime. What would you have said about the ninth painting you ever saw? You might have said it was beautiful, but you very well might recognize that that’s only a starting point, not an ending point.1
The two artworks I spent the most time with on my tour of SFMOMA, which I recounted in my Commonweal essay, were Gerhard Richter’s “Seascape” and Anselm Kiefer’s “Die Meistersinger.” “Seascape” is conventionally pretty: an expansive, graceful, placid — as promised — seascape. It’s the kind of thing we call beautiful, and rightly so.2
What makes it a work worth spending time with, though, is not just its straightforward beauty. It’s the simultaneous, conflicting facts that (1) it is photorealistic, and (2) it has been subtly scraped horizontally, as many Richters are, from edge to edge. The scraped lines, visible only on close examination, lend a surreality to the scene that is, at a glance, strikingly realistic. As a result, the picture is a greater thing than a huge-format photograph of the same scene would be. That photo would be beautiful, an achievement in its own right. But I think the painting would exceed it as a work, even if not in beauty.
Is “Die Meistersinger” beautiful? Certainly not in a conventional way. With its abundance of gross splotches and heaps of thatch on its surface, it isn’t pretty. I nevertheless found it transfixing.
But maybe that’s what people mean by beauty? The quality of an object to draw and hold your gaze? I don’t know. I don’t have comments turned on, but this is the sort of thing I’m probably supposed to follow with, “What do you think? Let me know in the comments,” to juice engagement.
I do think “beautiful” can be a useful descriptor of a thing when it’s unexpected or can’t be taken for granted. Not a beautiful sunset but a beautiful landfill.
One alternative to beauty is sublimity.3 The art historian T.J. Clark, in his terrific book The Sight of Death, finds sublimity in great paintings (though I don’t think he uses the term). The paintings exceed your capacity even to see them. They overpower you, but you eventually return to yourself, and when you do, you’re exhilarated by the feeling of having been exceeded and living to tell the tale. That’s the sublime. And, as I argue in the Commonweal essay, that’s what great visual artworks do — not just hold our attention but surpass it.
All of that said, I can’t quite dispel my doubts. I mean, who can argue against the account of beauty offered by the Canadian philosophers McKenzie and McKenzie (1997):
Two other essays on museums by writers I like — but who come away from the Matropolitan Museum of Art with quite different conclusions than I did from SFMOMA — are Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s review of an exhibition of Sienese painting and Tara Isabella Burton’s Substack essay on wandering the Met. Both are worth a read. (But read my essay first, please.)
And finally, if you were wondering (and you probably weren’t) why I began the essay with a scene on the BART train, the reason is that I drew inspiration from Chloe Cooper Jones’s 2019 essay, “Such Perfection,” which later evolved into her 2022 memoir, Easy Beauty, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Jones’s essay begins with a scene of her on a train. As an homage to her, I began mine with a train scene, too.
The word “beauty” appears about 40 times in Jones’s excellent, indeed, beautiful piece — strong evidence that I’m the idiot here.
Incidentally, I would not be an opera subscriber if it were not for Jessa Crispin’s podcast series on classical music. In one episode, Crispin recounts the experience of being invited to a concert in Berlin by an older couple who went to one performance or other throughout the city every night. Crispin went in with very little appreciation for classical music, and she even left the performance having had a strong and varied emotional reaction without a good sense for what she had just heard and seen. But then Herr and Frau Engels invited her to a nearby bar to talk about the performance. And, well, that changed everything for her.
Crispin’s account of this experience changed something for me, too. Soon after listening, I bought tickets to “Elektra,” which totally blew me away. Now I’m hooked.
As I was writing this, Ministry’s “Jesus Built My Hotrod” came on the radio. Is the song beautiful? Not really. Did I just turn it up? You better believe I did.
I’ve been in my Kant era for more than a year. I drew from Kant’s account of the sublime in an essay about the experience of the solar eclipse last spring for Commonweal.