Tag Archives: beauty

Difficult Beauty

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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exploding wineThroughout much of the history of aesthetics beauty has been the term of highest aesthetic praise, referring to objects that exhibit perfect symmetry, proportion and harmony, and often associated with the divine. But terms that refer to more ordinary aesthetic experiences—pretty, pleasant, charming, nice, lovely, etc.—receive almost no attention. This is odd to say the least because the vast majority of aesthetic experiences in ordinary life are best described as pretty, pleasant or nice.

This is surely true of wine. Most of us don’t drink the most impressive wines on a regular basis. Everyday wines of quality can best be described as pleasant, nice, scrumptious or some other adjective denoting a common experience. To describe a wine as pretty is a term of praise. Our lives are suffused with these more modest experiences. Without things that are pretty or pleasant our lives would be much poorer. Our experiences of things that are pretty or nice are genuine aesthetic experiences despite being ignored by people who should know better.

However, what I find even more odd about traditional aesthetics is that when I think about harmony, symmetry and related concepts, it’s pretty or pleasant objects that exhibit them. Pretty pictures have all their elements working together with balanced colors and graceful lines, nothing jagged or garish. They have unity and feel complete. Pleasant wines are well balanced with round, prominent fruit set off by plenty of acidity to keep the wine fresh, a conventional aroma profile with just enough complexity to be interesting but nothing confusing or off-putting, and if the wine is red, sufficient tannins to give the wine some length and intensity. In short, pretty, nice, pleasant things have nothing of difficulty about them. They effortlessly enter our lives producing no conflict and providing many moments of modest joy precisely because they exhibit harmony, symmetry and balance.

Beauty by contrast is something less comforting. Objects become beautiful when some difficulty is introduced, something that disrupts harmony and makes us think or react. The intensity of beauty comes from contrast not symmetry. A symmetrical face is pretty; it becomes beautiful when animated by the complexities of a personality that hints at something tumultuous just below the surface. Musical passages are beautiful when they contain sufficient tension to elicit powerful emotions. The great composers are masters at building tension that never fully resolves. What makes a painting such as Monet’s Water Lilies beautiful, and not merely pretty, is that it draws us into a maelstrom of swirling color that has no border so we feel on the edge of the infinite.

Similarly, great wines are paradoxical, marrying incompatible features such as power and finesse or complexity and simplicity that leave us with a sense of wonder and mystery about how it all works. They are hard to understand, can feel overwhelming in their intensity and may exhibit features that are unusual and distinctive. Great wines have balance but they feel like they’re pushing the limits of balance striving to keep the various intensities under control.

My point is that beauty is best viewed as unity and good form subtly disrupted by contrasts and intensities that the work struggles to accommodate. The aesthetic tradition is mistaken in conceptualizing beauty as perfect proportion and harmony.

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A Platonic Valentine

12 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by in General Aesthetics, Philosophy

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grassLove seeks beauty, a reckless, itinerant gambler aimed at the eternal possession of the good.

Love in its quest for beauty thus directs the mind toward knowledge.

But not knowledge of generality, not of types or stereotypes,  but of particulars, of individuality,

Of features so specific they belong to only one person, one work, one blade of grass.

Love seeks radical difference, how something differs from everything else.

Gesturing at the infinite, an unfulfilled hope.

The Beauty of Edible Things

23 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Art and Food, Art and Wine, Contemporary Food Culture, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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atelier crenn

Atelier Crenn
A creation of Chef Dominique Crenn

Last week I linked to Michael Rosen’s brief discussion of beauty at Guilded Birds. Rosen writes that beauty is the promise of happiness.

GB So what makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

MR I don’t think I can answer that but I still think if you had to have a single definition of beauty then Stendhal’s is the best – that beauty is the promise of happiness. We shouldn’t misunderstand that. Not all promises are kept. Some promises are beautiful because they’re a lie or an illusion – that we can be beyond pain or grief. But even acceptance of transience is a form of happiness. So Picasso’s decrepit old man with the guitar could embody beauty seen in that way.

I want to unpack that idea and see how it relates to food and wine.

I take it that he means it is not the works themselves that promise happiness but our relationship with them that produces that promise. For some works are tragic, sad, despairing, etc. But our involvement with them may nevertheless enrich our lives.

To find something beautiful is not just to think it pretty or attractive. When we find something beautiful we feel there is something more to it that has not yet been discovered, our relationship with it has not exhausted its value, we want it to be repeated again and again. Great works of art, when we find them beautiful, haunt us even when they are not present and we look forward to our next encounter as if it were a new experience. But even simple things—natural objects, a poet’s word, a ceremony, a piece of furniture, things that resonate with the spirit of who made them—can have that aura of mystery and incompleteness about them.

But since we don’t know what has not yet been discovered, we cannot articulate precisely what that quality is that we find so compelling. This is the bane of all art criticism. We can speak about the beautiful but the words are by necessity inadequate.

Food and wine can be beautiful in that they sometimes promise happiness. Of course “tasting good” is not sufficient. Chocolate ice cream tastes good but it’s hard to conjure a sense of mystery about it. But food and wine that refers to the people who produce it, that has the mysterious ability to gather people and create community, that succeeds in anchoring a sense of identity, that commands us to take time, focus on the moment and recognize the intrinsic value of things, or that is starkly and utterly original—such edible things can be beautiful because they promise happiness.

Can Art Replace Religion?

16 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in General Aesthetics

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blue guitar Art, or something very much like art, has occupied an important place in almost all cultures throughout history. This is so, it is often claimed, because art offers a window into the workings of the human mind or reveals aspects of the world that are unavailable to other forms of inquiry. Art is in some sense revelatory.

But what is it precisely that is being revealed? New truths about reality are constantly revealed through science. But art does not seem to produce insight in the way that science does. Some people think that art and music communicate ways of being human that go beyond what can be explicitly articulated as a “message”. But what are these ways of being human that art uniquely reveals? It is hard to credit a claim that cannot be articulated.

Art is in some respects similar to religion. It invests activities and things with significance, invites us to look beyond ourselves, sometimes promises contact with something more real than ordinary life, and can sometimes involve rituals. But since the vast majority of people largely ignore art, it isn’t obvious it performs these functions particularly well.

In light of these questions about the function of art, this interview with philosopher Michael Rosen on beauty is interesting. Rosen was asked, by the fascinating website Guilded Birds, to choose a work he considers “beautiful” and comment on what makes it so. He chose a series of paintings by David Hockney that illustrate the Wallace Stevens’ poem “Blue Guitar”

In this poem, Wallace Stevens is very much concerned with that aspiration of art to stand in for a religious ideal of transcendence. The question is, can we look to art to compensate for some aspects of religion disappearing from our lives and what aspects would those be. I find the Stevens to be very thought provoking there: the central idea seems to be that the elevating function of religion has been transferred to art (“poetry, exceeding music, takes the place of empty heaven and its hymns”) but that poetry is over-burdened because of that. Guitarists can become so immersed in their music that a kind of magical quality emerges from it – that seems to be the thin thread we’re hanging on to if we want to use art to transcend ourselves

Rosen is both intrigued and skeptical of the idea that art can bear the weight of replacing religion in our contemporary, more secular age. And he is quite aware of the irony of appealing to poetry in this context—an art that barely disturbs the public’s inattention.

But might art’s failure be traced to the fallen fate of beauty in the art world?

Speaking of 18th Century notions of beauty Rosen says:

In those days “beauty” meant to many people a well orderedness, a classical harmony of structural form. For others it was a kind of instinctive aesthetic pleasure. I’m particularly fascinated by the Germans’ identification of beauty with this quality they called “Schöner Schein” – I suppose you’d say ‘beautiful illusion’, a sort of elusive, even dream-like quality, where “beauty” points you in some unspecific way to a higher realm….Coleridge had the idea that the “symbolic” is the “translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal and the special” – that is, that there is always some kind of iconic, indefinite quality in something truly beautiful; that authentic art somehow “points beyond itself”.

Of course, Rosen knows that the art world no longer considers beauty an essential aim of art. Much of 20th Century art and art criticism was an attempt to render beauty irrelevant.

So in the end he suggests that beauty is not about transcendence; rather it points to something more mundane, the promise of happiness.

GB (Guilded Bird) So what makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

MR I don’t think I can answer that but I still think if you had to have a single definition of beauty then Stendhal’s is the best – that beauty is the promise of happiness. We shouldn’t misunderstand that. Not all promises are kept. Some promises are beautiful because they’re a lie or an illusion – that we can be beyond pain or grief. But even acceptance of transience is a form of happiness. So Picasso’s decrepit old man with the guitar could embody beauty seen in that way.

I think Rosen may be giving up too quickly on the 18th Century connection between beauty and transcendence. In fact, if it can be argued that art is failing in its role as the vehicle of transcendence, it may be because it has jettisoned beauty as its salient feature. I’m inclined to think beauty (as opposed to the picturesque) just is that ineffable sense of mystery that some art objects have, the promise of something more that lies just beyond our comprehension that demands we explore it further–transcendence.

This painting, also at Guilded Bird, to me, has that quality.

ray-of-lightcross

Ray of Light by Fergus Martin

So what does all this have to do with food and wine? I’ll comment on that in the near future.

Not by Bread Alone: Morality and Wine

07 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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Tom Wark’s blog post,”The Moralist the and Wine Blogger” struck a nerve, in part because I’ve had this debate with myself.

Wark, a wine publicist and widely-read blogger, summarizes a conversation he had with someone who insisted that time devoted to drinking, promoting, or writing about wine is wasted time.

It’s just that the consequences of selling wine and wine blogging don’t really play an important role in anyone’s lives. It doesn’t help people. People’s lives aren’t bettered and they don’t really flourish more because you write press releases and go on about wine ratings or wine laws or natural wine…Let me put it more bluntly: If you are not working to improve the well being of others then you are missing the opportunity to live a good life and wasting the most precious commodity we all possess—a life lived in close proximity to other conscious, living beings.

In response to the obvious rejoinder that wine gives some people great pleasure and many wine lovers find wine writing to be engaging, Wark’s critic accused him of selfish rationalization.

The claim that moral concerns ought to outrank any other consideration is not new. In fact the dominant moral theories in our moral tradition—Kantian and utilitarian theories—both entail that we have categorical duties to help others in need that invariably outweigh the satisfaction of personal desires or the pursuit of personal pleasure.

But such moralism (whether theoretical or practical) is just a load of bunk.

There are saints among us, people who seem capable of genuinely taking up the cause of humankind, of sacrificing everything personal for the sake of the common good. It is an odd psychology, worthy of understanding and celebrating.  But most people are not like that. For most of us , if we are to be effective, if we are to get up each day full of motivation and drive, we must do what we love. But we cannot love everything or everyone. There is no love without discrimination. To love something is to hold it in higher regard in comparison to what is unloved. If you love your spouse, other people are less deserving of your attention.

And a life without love is not worth living.

The difficulty with moralists is that their demands are infinite. There are simply too many people in need, so to take up their cause is to crowd out all personal satisfaction from one’s life in a never ending and ultimately failed attempt to alleviate human suffering. The moralist’s demand is thus a demand to blot out what one loves—in a word, nihilism. (With all due respect to The Dude and his cohorts, it is best to avoid nihilism.)

Now, of course, from the fact that I cannot serve everyone, it does not follow that I should serve no one. But it does follow that only the piecemeal serving of individuals is possible and a general prescription to serve everyone is incoherent. So how do I choose who to serve? The only coherent answer is to serve those you love first and everyone else can get in line. (Which is not to say we aren’t traumatized by the destitution of those we cannot love)

Which brings us back to wine, because for Tom Wark and his readers (of which I am one), it is wine they love. Perhaps this is the crux of the moralist’s argument. She may be on board with my prescription to serve those you love as long as we’re talking about people. But wine is just a beverage, a commodity, not worthy of serious concern.

And now the moralist’s problem is becoming clear. She simply does not drink enough wine having not had that moment of revelation that unites wine lovers, that finds extraordinary beauty in, say, a cuvée from the hills behind Beaune.

But more seriously, artists, artisans, writers, musicians, actors, intellectuals, and, yes, winemakers, are engaged in creating something all human beings desperately need—culture. Human beings do not live by bread alone, we seek meaning and we are always in danger of losing it.  Through culture we transform the organic, physical, instrumental, impersonal flotsam and jetsam of experience into symbols that express and sustain meaning. It is where the creation or destruction of what we value is enacted, where we decide what has significance and what does not.

So nothing is more important to human flourishing than to keep culture alive.

We especially need beauty in our lives, for beauty arouses the desire to draw things near, it impels love and a thirst for knowledge. The loss of beauty is like the loss of love. Without it, everything is reduced to a forgettable, discouraging sameness that is another road to nihilism.

An acquaintance with beauty will not by itself make a person better, but pervasive ugliness will surely make her worse.

Moralists have every right to censure the vicious; but they should leave the creators of culture alone (if indeed they are not vicious) because they are as necessary to human flourishing as food and water.