John Laurie A Defense of Objectivity in Aesthetics HUMA 201 10.29.

2013

A Defense of Objectivity in Aesthetics

Much of contemporary American culture glorifies relativity and subjectivity in all things. Popular culture often teaches that it is the task of the individual to determine what is right, what is true, and what is beautiful. The champions of objectivity stand contra mundum, and are frequently vilified and ridiculed by the world at large. It is widely considered to be close-minded bigotry to claim that one standard of truth or beauty might in fact be correct, suggesting that an opposing view might be incorrect. Millions of voices, voices of the informed, the enlightened, the tolerant, rise together to cry, There are no absolutes. This is especially apparent in the fine arts. Relativism dominates the art world. There are almost no standards for beauty; rather the artist simply creates what he wishes to create and then claims that it in fact art.1 The Portland Museum of art purchased a painting last year for nearly two million dollars. The artist had chosen to call the work in question Contrast. It was a large canvas, all white, with three small, black dots in the center. John Cage, a popular modern pianist, composed a piece in 2009 which he christened, Silence. In concert, Cage took the stage and sat down at the piano. He adjusted the bench, closed his eyes, and sat in silence for exactly two minutes and fifty three seconds. A critic described the piece as hauntingly beautiful. Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, and a host of others espouse an art theory known as abstraction. Pollock, rather than painting with a paintbrush and easel, sets his canvas on the floor. He then suspends buckets of paint above the canvas, fills them to the brim with discordant, jarring pastels, and sets them swinging like pendulums, allowing the paint to drip onto the canvas. His

Chris Swoyer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Relativism, Stanford University, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/ (accessed October 31, 2013)
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most famous painting, No. 5, 1948, sold for 141.7 million dollars.2 It is to date the worlds most expensive work of art in the acrylic medium. In the midst of this culture, it is deemed almost laughable to propose that there might be an aesthetic standard; that beauty might in fact be evaluated objectively. Can one thing be, in fact, more or less beautiful than another? As human beings, it is our solemn duty to answer: yes. It is a denial of our very existence to claim that beauty is anything other than objective. Men are created in Gods image, and as such are imbued with an innate sense of what is good and what is beautiful. In a sense, it is accurate to claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, the beholder simply fails to realize that he is a creature, created in Imago Dei, and thus is naturally drawn to art that reflects the God whom he in turn reflects. God, in Genesis, declared his creation to be good. Then, after men fell, God modified the very fabric of the world to demonstrate not only his pleasure but his wrath. All of creation serves to do one of two things; to evidence Gods goodwill toward men or exhibit his ire and foreshadow the judgment to come. Good and evil are pitted against each other everywhere we look, not least of all in the arts. It is worthy of note that unskilled art is not, in fact, bad art. An attempt to create good art might prove to be unsuccessful for any number of reasons. The artist might lack proficiency, or perhaps his materials might be in some way substandard. Noble attempts that produce inferior results are not bad. Bad art is any work that claims to be beautiful while standing in direct opposition to objective aesthetic standards. Good art, by contrast, is art that flows from a mans innate, Godly creative energy. This art ought to reflect the God who formed forms, created creation, and spoke into existence all that

Carol Vogel, Art and Design, A Pollock is Sold, Possibly for a Record Price, New York Times, nytimes.com (accessed October 29)
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ever was, and ever will be. Art ought to truly express its subject matter in a way that is comprehensible and edifying to the viewer, reader or listener. It is true that there is room for creative license; it certainly cannot be said that Beethovens Fifth Symphony is inherently superior to Scott Joplins ragtime masterpiece, The Entertainer or Bob Segers Still the Same. Each is a beautiful thing in its own rite. Each is melodic, emotionally charged, and intentional. Beethovens music engulfs the listener; Joplins excites him; Segers causes him to reflect, perhaps to remember an episode in his own life that is in some way related to the lyrical message of the piece. The champion of true beauty would in fact be an irrational dogmatist if he refused to admit that one mans artistic tastes might be different from those of his contemporaries. However, all art has the same ultimate end: to delight; to fill the beholder with pleasure. It therefore must be a reflection of the God that made us in its order, its richness, and its emotional potency. John Cages Silence does not transport the listener, nor does it cause him to consider what it is to be a man and to appreciate beauty. It is, in its essence, nothing less than a shameless lie. It poses as that which it is not; namely music. To claim that one has created art when one has done nothing of the kind is false witness, and consequently immoral. Blank canvases are not paintings, meaningless words are not poems, and two minutes, fifty three seconds of thundering silence is not a song. Consumers of this false art are deluded. They have successfully desensitized themselves; they have been propagandized into believing that it is culturally inexcusable to raise a voice in protest. They have learned to stomach bad art just as rodents have learned to stomach refuse. To understand more fully why bad art is in fact morally reprehensible and a reflection of the sin that indwells the hearts of men, one must examine the history of the aesthetic ideal as the Western mindset has evolved over the course of thousands of years. First, one might examine the

Greeks. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote, Only that which is beautiful is loved. That which is not beautiful cannot be loved. The Greeks glorified order, balance, harmony, symmetry and simple elegance. Grecian art was mathematically precise. Their architecture was built on an aesthetic foundation that they referred to as the golden ratio; a rectangle of precise proportions that left room for creative expression while setting boundaries for the artist.3 With this came symmetrical forms, geometric accuracy, and an ordered, precise art for that distinguished their culture from the rest of the ancients. Their paintings and sculptures were dictated by four standards that, as legend had it, Zeus had revealed through the oracle at Delphi: The most beautiful is that which is the most just, Observe the limit, Shun arrogance, and Nothing in excess. This accounts for the understated beauty that is so characteristic of Grecian culture. The Greek ideal of beauty also arose from their basic assumption that truth could be found through reason and that order was superior to chaos. The Greeks were objective thinkers. Platos philosophy was grounded in his theory of the forms; he believed that there was an ideal of beauty that we strove for, and that all of nature actively sought to reach. He believed that all temporal things were shadows of their true form; a horse was simpl y a shadow of the perfect horse. A man was just a shadow of the perfect man. This was the prevalent philosophy among Greek artisans. They endeavored, in everything that they created, to exemplify the forms.4 As the Western mindset evolved, so did the aesthetic ideal. Greek culture declined with the rise of the Roman Empire. The Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks, and their art is not radically different. However, there are subtle differences that are worthy of note. Roman Ron Knott, Fibonacci and the Golden Ratio, The Parthenon and Greek Architecture, par.2, September 22, 2010, http://www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/, (accessed October 31, 2013)
3

Donald Watts, Platos Theory of The Forms, Greek History, par.2, 2006, history.hanover.edu, (accessed October 31, 2013)
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art was less creative and more stern. The Roman Empire was a military giant; while the Greeks were a nation of silver, the Romans were a nation of iron. The men in Roman sculptures carry themselves like soldiers. The women in Roman frescos bear stern, matronly expressions. While the Greeks portrayed men and women alike in the nude, glorifying the natural form of the human body, Roman art depicted men and women alike fully clothed. Order and civilization were higher virtues than natural beauty.5 Eventually the Roman Empire crumbled and the epicenter of Western Civilization shifted from the Mediterranean to the European continent. Unfortunately, with the decline of the Roman order, the world fell into chaos. Many historians have christened the period of time following the decline of Rome the dark ages. Conditions were harsh, and survival became mankinds cardinal priority. Only the high ranking churchmen had the leisure or resources to pursue the arts, and as a result any painting, sculpture, architecture or music produced during this time period had a strong religious theme. Medieval cathedrals employed flying buttresses and high, narrow windows to draw the eyes of the churchgoer toward heaven. Paintings depicted scenes such as the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the visitation of the Holy Spirit during Pentecost. Sculptures were typically commissioned by the church and depicted church fathers, saints or Biblical figures. Paintings often depicted heavenly scenes on a sweeping scale, employing bright, lavish colors. If it were not for the church, art would have essentially disappeared during this period of history.6

R.A. Giuseppi, Greek and Roman Art, History of the World International, pg.83, http://history-world.org/arthist.htm, (accessed October 22, 2013) 6 Anonymous, Medieval Art History, par.2, 2013, http://www.arthistory.net/artstyles/medievalart/medievalart1.html, (accessed October 25, 2013)
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The medieval ages drew to a close with the dawn of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers rejected theism and set a goddess on the throne that God had previously occupied; the goddess of reason. They believed that man, by employing his intellect, could improve himself and society. They tore down the edifice of tradition and erected a temple to science. This is particularly apparent in the art of the day. Gone were the sweeping, heavenly murals. Gone were the statues of the Virgin and Saint Peter. Gone were the jewel encrusted crucifixes. Enlightenment art is secular in the extreme. However, irreligious though it may have been, Enlightenment art was still beautiful. While some of the artisans of the day had discarded faith in favor of human reason, they had not rejected the conception of absolute truth and beauty. Rather, they had changed the ultimate standard from God to man. They had rejected revelation in favor of deduction, but had, as creatures made in the image of God, developed a sound aesthetic standard. However, they had paved the way for the modernists and postmodernists that would eventually discard aesthetic standards altogether, and make man his own god, capable of creating his own truth and his own beauty. After the Enlightenment philosophers came the modern secular humanists. They were the original social Darwinists, operating on the assumption that mankind could, through cooperation and a communal, unshaking faith in reason, achieve social nirvana.7 The pictorial art of this day glorified man in his element. It also promoted equality by depicting men from all classes, ages, stations and positions in life. The message was simple: man can find happiness and fulfillment

Amy Crawford, Historical Optimism: The Use of Utopia in The Enlightenment Era, pg.86, n.d., http://www.academia.edu/, (accessed October 19, 2013)
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apart from God; he simply has to embrace his own primacy. Man became the ultimate focus, and God was relegated to the pages of picture books.8 Finally, along came the postmodernists and the death of the aesthetic standard. The postmodern movement was brought on by World Wars one and two. Man, after convincing himself that through his own cleverness and power he had helped society progress to a nearperfect paradise, watched as his ideal world tore itself to pieces. Piles of dead bodies rotted in concentration camps. Soldiers lost feet, hands, legs, and arms in the trenches. The death toll rose and spirits fell. Man was lost without his ultimate standard. He had discarded the worship of God and erected a temple to himself, and now his temple crumbled. He was not worthy of worship. He could no longer stand as a standard for beauty. He was still convinced of his own beauty, but he had come to face the reality that he was a killer angel; a thing of tainted beauty and soiled splendor. Now, it might seem logical that he would turn back to the God who he had abandoned so many years ago, but he took a different route. He decided that there were in fact no absolutes, no objective standards, and that truth itself was fictional; a cruel joke. This philosophy is clearly manifested in many works of popular art produced since the early-mid to mid-20th century. One particularly recognizable postmodernist painter was Pablo Picasso. His painting style was fragmented and broken; you could tell neither right from left, top from bottom, chair from table, or man from woman. This brokenness and confusion reflected the state of postmodern society. Man was lost and his ideals were shattered. He, like Picasso, could not tell top from bottom. Postmodern sculpture is similarly abstract; its composition is almost laughably ambiguous. Even connoisseurs of postmodern art could probably never tell you exactly why one Amy Crawford, Historical Optimism: The Use of Utopia in The Enlightenment Era, par.1, n.d., http://www.academia.edu/, (accessed October 19, 2013)
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particular sculpture is called Daedalus while another is called Brazen Fury. Both are meaningless conglomerations of geometric forms in which, if the viewer desires, he may attempt to discern some pattern or truth. Try as he might, however, he is bound to fail. The artist created the piece with the express purpose of draining art of its meaning, and, as C.S. Lewis wrote in his Chronicles of Narnia the trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you typically succeed.9 However, not all postmodern art is abstract or nonfigurative. Minimalism is another popular philosophy of art in this day and age. It reflects the same despair and confusion that abstract art depicts, but with a different intention. Abstract art makes ludicrous claims concerning itself. Picasso has the audacity to claim that a discordant arrangement of polygons on a canvas is a man. He intends to demonstrate to any who happen to encounter his painting that there is no true man and there is no true beauty. His man is just as human as a man that Renoir might have painted five hundred years ago. Minimalist art is very humble by contrast. It makes claims about itself that no one could deny. Minimalist paintings, sculptures, and musical compositions are childishly simple. Personal expression is marginalized in order to give the work in question an almost purely literal presence. Frank Stella, a notable postmodern painter, once said of minimalist art, What you see is what you see. Why the almost comical simplicity? Why do away with the intricacy and complexity of truly beautiful art in favor of a sterile plainness? Because for all of mankinds protestations, he is still a creature created in the image of God and he still knows, somewhere within him, that there is an objective standard. It is his thirst for some tiny piece of truth, however inconsequential, that has given rise to minimalist art. No man can deny that a white canvas with three small, black dots in the center demonstrates contrast.

Lewis, The Magicians Nephew, pg. 108

Therefore, the artist christens the work Contrast. He has created, in his mind, something truly beautiful. He has created an anchor to stabilize him on the stormy sea that is modern culture. He has found truth. Meaningless truth perhaps; truth that he can in no way apply to his life or use to improve himself or the world around him, but truth nonetheless. Undeniable truth. It is plain that as history has progressed, the previous aesthetic standard has passed away and a new standard has arisen: the standard of the individual. We have now examined the evolution of the dominant cultural mindset along with its effect on the fine arts, but we have not as yet discussed the root cause of this transition from objectivity to subjectivity. What has motivated this devolution in the arts? Why the shift from pleasing to repulsive, from intricacy to desolate blankness, from truth to abstraction? Simply put, the hubris of mankind. Pride was mans downfall in the garden, and pride has raped beauty and left it for the carrion birds. In the words of Acts chapter seven, verse fifty one, man is a stiff-necked creature. He will not and cannot admit that he is answerable to any but himself, and rages against his innate sense of all that is Godly. Beauty is Godly, and man has crushed it. In doing so, he has crushed himself. The Postmodern man is a house divided. He stands against himself, and will surely fall. He is a creature in the image of God, and therefore finds delight in order, beauty and truth. However, he has made the decision to deny his humanity and has attempted to cast off these standards in favor of his own. He is furious with God because he cannot deny His existence. His art is an expression of that fury; an expression of his belief that he knows better than God. Gods objective standards do not suit him. Rather, in spiteful pride, he rejects them in favor of his own twisted, broken standards. He is rebelling against himself, against his God, and against the evidence of God in the natural world. This is why bad art is morally reprehensible in nature. It is a visible representation of mans pet sin; self-worship. It is the same as stem cell research,

abortion, gay marriage, and cult worship. It is yet another of mans attempts to make himself God. Therefore, it is the duty of the Christian and the humane individual to create, appreciate, and teach others to love good art. It is morally commendable to listen to beautiful music, to revel in the mastery of painters who have, through their God-given talents, produced works that will endure for generations, to enjoy the truly lovely things that others have given us to enjoy, and to in turn contribute our own creative energies and talents so that others may take joy in what we create. We are creative creatures, after the image of our maker, and we ought to meditate on whatever is lovely, and whatever is commendable. Through beauty, we can grow closer to our ultimately beautiful maker and discover his beauty within ourselves. We have been given a magnificent gift: the gift to fashion as he fashioned, enjoy as he enjoyed, and the ability to say, as he said, when our artistic labors have come to an end, It is good.

Works Cited

1.) Carpenter, Rhys. The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art: Of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971. Print. 2.) Schaeffer, Francis. The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer. Vol. 1. Illinois: Crossway, 1982. Print. 3.) Janson, H. W., and Joseph Kerman. A History of Art and Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Print. 4.) Maxwell, Robert A. Representing History, 900-1300: Art, Music, History. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010. Print. 5.) Aristotle, Ingram Bywater, W. Rhys Roberts, and Friedrich Solmsen. Rhetoric / Poetics ; Aristotle ; Translated by Ingram Bywater ; Introduction by Friedrich Solmsen. New York: Modern Library, 1954. Print. 6.) Swoyer, Chris, "Relativism." Stanford University. Stanford University, 02 Feb. 2003. Web. 01 Dec. 2013. 7.) Vogel, Carol. "A Pollock Is Sold, Possibly for a Record Price." Nytimes.com. New York Times, 02 Nov. 2006. Web. 8.) Knott, Ron. "Fibonacci Numbers and The Golden Section in Art, Architecture and Music." Fibonacci Numbers and The Golden Section in Art, Architecture and Music. Surrey.ac.uk, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2013. 9.) Watts, Donald. "Plato's Theory of Forms." Hanover.edu. Hanover University, 2006. Web. 04 Dec. 2013. 10.) Giuseppi, R. A. "GREEK AND ROMAN ART." GREEK AND ROMAN ART.

History World International, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2013.

11.)

Anonymous. "Medieval Art and Art History." Medieval Art and Art History.

Bitter Soup LLC, 2013. Web. 05 Dec. 2013. 12.) Crawford, Amy. "Historical Optimism: The Use of Utopia in the Enlightenment

Era." Academia.edu. Academia, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2013 13.) Lewis, C. S., and Pauline Baynes. The Magicians Nephew. New York: Scholastic,

1995. Print.