HOPE OF BEAUTY IN AN AGE OF UGLINESS AND DEATH, THE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Moore, T M

In his book Grammars of Creation, George Steiner raises the question of the very possibility of art-and, therefore, of beauty-in an age such as ours.1 The "violence, oppression, economic enslavement and social irrationality"-in short, the ugliness-of our times have "given despair a new warrant." Steiner fears that, as the new millennium begins, humanity may be headed in the direction of a "systematic turn-about towards bestialization." In such a situation, the very possibility of beauty may well seem remote, if not altogether frivolous.

I decided to conduct a little experiment to see if I could confirm Steiner's fears. I wanted to discover if the contemporary art community shares Steiner's concern about the possibility-or impossibility-of beauty in our day. I purchased a variety of magazines on contemporary art and read several of the feature articles, paying careful attention to the adjectives employed to describe the art under consideration. Here, in no particular order, is a representative catalogue of the qualifiers I encountered: foreign, fractured, claustrophobic, malevolent, ambiguous, frightening, strange, chilling, bizarre, hyper-ironic, debased, superficial, corrupt, unstable, and, not to be forgotten, beautiful. We may ask what the idea of "beautiful" might consist of amid such company as this. One contemporary artist obliges us with something of a definition. According to Fabian Marcaccio:

If we talk about beautiful things, I may have an image in my mind that is different from what any culture considers beautiful. The limit of the idea of abject art is that it plays off notions of beauty. I want to create a passage between contradictory things. I want to consider how you can see yourself as an ugly constellation and at the same time as a beautiful constellation. You can be made of opposites that cohabit, and this combination is what is important to me. Art is not a place for the beautiful and it is not a place for ugliness, it's a place where all these things should be analyzed. I never worry about something being beautiful or ugly. I mean, I can see a continuous line between something considered beautiful, a Fra Angelico painting, and a porn scene that I can find some beauty in.2

Whatever else this meditation on beauty accomplishes, it certainly makes it difficult to understand what the artist means by such a notion. That beauty exists is admitted. It seems, however, to be something associated either with works of the past or some merely subjective impression that is no more meaningful or significant than the idea of ugliness. Beauty is not so much something to be achieved as something to be "analyzed" and "played off" of. The clearest idea about beauty is that, whatever it is, it is not something about which contemporary art has to worry. Or, as John Dykstra Eusden and John H. Westerhoff III have observed: "In the West, beauty has an indistinct and diversionary character and is subordinate to truth, especially scientific truth, which is conceived of as always supreme. In the West, beauty typically appears as temptation, a force that can distract. Further, in the West we appropriate the beautiful in a privatistic manner, as an expression of individual taste."3

Certainly we would appear to be living in a period that militates "against confidence about the beautiful."4 Contemporary attempts at beauty seem, at best, futile, if not absurd, a condition that, according to Jacques Barzun, has resulted in a culture of decadence and an age of ugliness and death.5 Steiner, it seems, is correct when he questions the possibility of beauty in such an age.

But what is the explanation for this loss of confidence in the idea of beauty? Steiner attributes it to the loss of transcendence so characteristic of our increasingly secular age. He asks, "What significance attaches to the notion of the creation of expressive and executive forms, which we call 'art' and, I believe, 'philosophy,' if the theological possibility, in the larger sense, is put in the dustbin . . . ?"6 He observes: "The formally religious subscription of the act of hope, direct resort to supernatural intervention, has weakened almost continually in Western history and individual consciousness. It has atrophied into more or less superficial ritual and inert figures of speech."7 In this he echoes the views of other Christian critics of the arts such as Frank Burch Brown, H. R. Rookmaaker, and Gene Edward Veith Jr.8 There would thus appear to be something of a consensus among Christian observers of the arts, and many others as well,9 that the concept of beauty, so important in the arts for so long, now has been stripped of its dignity and uniqueness in an age that no longer regards the theological and aesthetic convictions of previous generations as matters of serious discussion.

If this is so, if the demise of beauty in the arts is the result of the loss of regard for the God of the western tradition and the arts deriving from that tradition, then the hope for a recovery of beauty is somehow linked with restoration of respect for this God. But this raises a problem in that, as almost everyone knows, there seems to be no shortage, at least in American society, of those who claim belief in this very God. Opinion polls routinely report belief in God to be hovering somewhere around the ninety percent mark among Americans; and there are literally tens of millions of Americans who go further than this and describe their relationship with God in very personal and passionate terms. There seems to be no shortage of belief in God in contemporary America; yet the decline of beauty and the ascendance of ugliness has become a daily and widespread complaint.