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to recap the discussion from the "Art is dangerous" thread
Astrojax:as keats said,
beauty is truth, truth beauty
that is all ye know and all ye need to know
art should at once be both truth and beauty. and truth can be dangerous, of course. often is. even if it can also be simply self-evident and so merely beautiful.
Legba Rex: When you say you can appreciate something as beautiful even if it isn't true, I find it hard to beleive that that noptional something is not true in some way or other.
Haus: So. Can we find a piece of art (let's skip the "great", which is subjective) that is true but not beautiful? I'd say yes. How about Damien Hirst's One Thousand Years. It's a cow's head covered in maggots. The maggots spawn, become flies, lay eggs and are killed by an electrified ring. Is it beautiful? I'd say no. Is it true? Inasmuch as it makes a true statement, yes. Ergo, if we take these statements to be correct, then the status of truth as beauty and beauty as truth is not in fact all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know - quod erat demonstrandum.
Using the Hirst example, i would argue that although the piece illustrates an interesting truth about life and does have an unpleasant appearance, it does not so easily escape being somehow beautiful in a nouminous kind of way.
Seeing the life cycles of the flies confined in a seemingly horrific way does not immediately call up a comparison to a beautiful painting (a vermeer landscape for example) but the concise nature of its communication and the aesthetic sensibilities with which it has been constructed renders it, in my opinion a beautiful object nonetheless.
was Keats not saying that the object itself has (arguably) an essential prescence, a "truth" of its existence and it is this inherent quality which is simultaneously True and Beautiful? |
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