Episode 52 – The Lie About Beauty
I bite off a huge task by defining both “art” and “beauty”. They aren’t the same thing and sometimes they should have nothing to do with one another. You’ll discover that you most likely believe a lie about beauty and I hope I can convince you to spit it out of your mouth. I also discuss a friendship that went wrong in some really gross ways.
Discover the artwork of Makato Fujimura.
January 5, 2022 @ 5:24 pm
Always interesting to listen to your podcasts.
Your Plato is showing, except it’s really deflated and, I think, contradictory. Rather than go the whole way and say that beauty is the eternal Good (which is truth), you diminish it to technique, which some people can recognize and others cannot. This is a perspective that an artist would be prone to believe, as it focuses on the craft rather than the experience that art suggests to people. Kant, for instance, gives us a perspectival definition of beauty from the point of view of the experiencer of beauty: it’s the free play of imagination and understanding (with disinterestedness, judgment of feeling, necessity of judgment, and other things thrown in).
So, if beauty is objective, real, and like truth, can you define it from the perspective of someone who views rather than creates art?
January 20, 2022 @ 8:34 am
No, quite to the contrary. I don’t think beauty is solely found in technique. I think technique is just one place where beauty can be discovered.
I thought I was defining it from a perspective of a viewer when describing the experience of a magnificent sunset and encouraging people to describe what they see. Whether or not the viewer can create, the viewer can describe and understand what makes something beautiful. A college education in the arts doesn’t make someone a great artist, but it does (or should) provide them with enough tools to be a critic. They should have the ability to talk about it even if they can’t create it.