3 ms·

Thanks for the tldr, I knew it was all fluff! Of course what we appreciate in the human faces (and bodies) vs. what we appreciate in art are very different thi

• clairity 6y ago
  > "This beauty is relative...." that doesn't seem to be the right descriptor for what you're relating. a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly (often but not always intentionally), but you can appreciate the context and the ideas around it and find those abstractions beautiful for their cleverness, intricacy, or whatever (as you can find a math equation elegant, or a piece of music passionate). the level to which you appreciate those contexts and ideas would be 'relative'. a lot of human affect contextualizes in a narrow band of difference when zoomed out, but our brains are attuned to those narrow bands (like how radio stations exist in a relatively narrow band of frequencies), which is to say what we find beautiful is mostly similar, and our relativity is relatively slight.
  • mojuba 6y ago
    > a lot of modern art, at a visceral level, is visually ugly and modern music sonically ugly Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly? When you say some art is "ugly at a visceral level" you need to show art that's beautiful at the same level. Is Modigliani's depiction of women beautiful or ugly? I'm sure you will hear both if you ask different people. To me it's breathtaking, whatever that means on the ugly-beautiful spectrum. On the other hand, there's a lot of earlier art (anything pre-impressionist basically) that tended to be more photographic and less inventive. You can find objectively beautiful things there but by today's standards they are boring, though you can appreciate this art within the context of the era. I think we should remove all forms of modern art from this debate. Beauty is no longer the goal of art.
    • clairity 6y ago
      > "Uhm, ugly relatively to what exactly?" before, you said > "...human beauty in my view is totally different because it's natural..." which is the yardstick from which i was extrapolating (that is, natural == visceral). > "Beauty is no longer the goal of art." i agree that modern art is no longer about (natural, visceral) beauty, but rather about conceptual/contextual interestingness. but those aren't relative, those are different yardsticks, hence my attempt to disentangle the two.
    • toyg 6y ago
      Raffaello, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Leonardo... they are not boring to anyone even today. The Nike of Samothrace is spectacular even when you don’t know when and where it comes from. Your impressionist cut off is very arbitrary. I agree that official art abandoned the search for absolute beauty a long time ago (basically with modernism), I just wouldn’t chuck away 2500 years of masterpieces because “realism boring”. In fact, looking at attendance numbers for art events, one could easily make the case that “old and boring” art remains more popular than XX+ century art.
    • cjohnson318 6y ago
      I agree with you, mostly. I don't think Rembrandt, or Caravaggio, or almost any other pre-impressionists look photographic. They're representational, but they're also highly stylized. All of the 'Old Masters' exaggerated or idealized forms, and exaggerated temperature, gamut, and contrast. The number of people that actually meant to practice trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) is very small. Trompe l'oeil is generally seen as a schtick; if you don't have anything original to add, then don't bother.
    • airstrike 6y ago
      > Beauty is no longer the goal of art. Yes and most disgracefully.
• ACow_Adonis 6y ago
  well, I think you're demonstrably wrong on the later, such that even if we accept there is something like a "universal" sense of human beauty (which I'll take as a highly debatable point) , there's also a learned/adaptive component that can't easily be separated from an individual's experience: it seems it can interfere, override or accentuate the first. We can see this in various cross-cultural and historical comparisons where it's not clear that any inherent or obviously individual property should be considered beautiful in a universal sense. Is foot binding beautiful? Is clear skin or scarification and body modding beautiful? What about lighter skin? is it beautiful because it suggests aristocracy and not working in the fields, or is a sun tan beautiful? or does white skin, to use a phrase from darker skinned indigenous populations make people "look like a corpse". Is it the anorexic, the aenemic, the flushed, the athlete, the labourer, or the obese? The weirder thing I've noticed talking to people is this IDEA that physical beauty must be objective is so entrenched in some, that they will actively deny or remove reported data points to the contrary (no, he doesn't really think that's beautiful/ he's lying about his perception of that beautiful man/woman).