The Post-War Era and the Present
After 1945 the great question was no longer what is beautiful but what is art, who decides it and whose gaze counts. Philosophers, critics and sociologists challenged modernism’s faith in pure form, while architects rebelled against the smooth façade. Today beauty has returned as a question, but in a world with many different answers.
The Second World War and the Holocaust cast a long shadow over all talk of beauty. Theodor W. Adorno, who together with Max Horkheimer had analysed the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wrote shortly after the war that to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. This was not a ban on art but a question of how art can be true in a world that has done the unthinkable. Adorno’s answer, which he developed up to the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory (1970), was that autonomous, difficult and often ugly art, such as Schoenberg’s music or Beckett’s plays, can resist a society in which everything else has become commodity and entertainment. It was a defence of modernism, but a dark and critical one.
In New York, American art took over the leading role from Paris. Jackson Pollock laid his canvases on the floor and dripped and poured paint over them, and the critics offered two different explanations. In 1952 Harold Rosenberg spoke of action painting, in which the canvas became an arena for the artist’s act. Clement Greenberg instead saw Pollock as the culmination of a long formal development. In the essay Modernist Painting (1960) he described modernism as a process in which each art tests its own means and purges itself of everything that does not belong to it. For painting, this meant accepting the canvas as a flat surface. Greenberg called Kant the first real modernist, because Kant had used reason to test the limits of reason itself. His formalism, which built on Fry and Bell but was more historical, became the dominant criticism of the 1950s. Among the artists themselves there were other words. In 1948 Barnett Newman wrote the essay The Sublime Is Now, in which he argued that American art should free itself from the European tradition of beauty and seek the sublime directly, without myths or motifs. The concept from Burke and Kant was thus given new life in the large colour fields of Newman and Mark Rothko.
The new generation of artists soon made Greenberg’s programme impossible. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and his Brillo Boxes (1964) looked like goods in a shop. The philosopher Arthur C. Danto, who saw the Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York in 1964, realised that no visible property could distinguish them from the boxes stacked in a warehouse. What made them art was something the eye cannot see: an atmosphere of theory and a knowledge of the history of art, what he called the artworld. With this, the question that Duchamp’s Fountain had posed in 1917 was taken seriously. Danto later concluded that the history of art as a story of progress towards a goal, as in Hegel and Greenberg, had come to an end, since anything could now be art. Pop art, with Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and earlier British artists such as Richard Hamilton, took its motifs from comics, advertising and packaging, and thereby questioned both the boundary with everyday images and the idea of the artist’s unique touch. Warhol called his studio The Factory.
Analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world took up the question in its own way. In 1956 Morris Weitz argued, drawing on Wittgenstein, that art is an open concept that cannot be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. George Dickie responded with the institutional theory: art is an object that has been conferred the status of candidate for appreciation by someone acting on behalf of the institutions of the artworld. Nelson Goodman replaced the question “What is art?” with “When is art?”, since the same object can function as art in one context but not in another. What they have in common is that beauty, which for two thousand years had been at the centre of aesthetics, almost disappeared from the discussion. Aesthetics became the philosophy of art. The question of what makes an object beautiful was replaced by the question of what makes it art, and the answer was sought in contexts, institutions and theories rather than in sensuous properties.
At the same time, others protested against the idea that art must always be interpreted and explained. In the essay Against Interpretation (1964) Susan Sontag wrote that interpretation makes works of art tame and comfortable by replacing the experience with a meaning. Instead of an art of interpretation she called for a sensuous attention to form and surface. Her Notes on “Camp” (1964) took seriously a taste for the exaggerated and artificial that serious criticism had despised. The boundary between high and low culture, which Greenberg had guarded in the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939), was beginning to dissolve.
In the 1960s and 1970s the forms of art burst every frame. The minimalists exhibited industrially manufactured boxes and plates, conceptual artists made works consisting only of ideas and instructions, and land artists left the galleries altogether. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), a spiral of rock running out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah, cannot be bought, moved or exhibited, and it disappears and reappears with the water level. In 1979 the art historian Rosalind Krauss described how sculpture had ended up in an expanded field between landscape and architecture. Performance art made the artist’s body and time into material. The object of traditional aesthetics, a lasting work contemplated from a distance, could no longer be taken for granted.
Architecture went through a corresponding crisis. After the war, cities were rebuilt according to the principles of modernism, with high-rise blocks, separated traffic and large-scale housing estates, but as early as 1961 Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, attacked the planning that tore down living urban neighbourhoods. In 1966 Robert Venturi turned against Mies van der Rohe’s slogan “less is more” and replied that less is a bore. He wanted an architecture of complexity and contradiction that took account of history and of the ordinary, commercial city. Charles Jencks declared, with deliberate exaggeration, that modern architecture died when demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis began in 1972. Postmodernism brought in colour, historical quotation and irony, and architecture once again became something to be read and interpreted. In the 1990s came a new turn, when sculptural buildings such as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) made architecture an attraction for entire cities. At the same time, questions of sustainability, reuse and climate have become increasingly important, and they are changing what is perceived as a good and beautiful building: what is durable and what can be maintained and rebuilt acquires a new aesthetic value.
Another critique was aimed at the gaze itself. In the television series and book Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger showed, drawing on Walter Benjamin, that our way of seeing art is shaped by ownership, class and gender, and that the European nude had made woman into an object for a male spectator. In 1971 Linda Nochlin asked why there have been no great women artists, and answered that the cause lay in the institutions, in education and in the idea of the innate genius, not in any deficiency in women. In 1975 Laura Mulvey analysed how film had been built around the male gaze. The seemingly neutral concepts of taste, beauty and genius were thereby revealed to be bound up with power.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu went even further. In La Distinction (Distinction, 1979), which he subtitled a social critique of the judgement of taste, with a clear barb aimed at Kant, he showed through large surveys in France that taste follows education and social background. The disinterested, pure contemplation that Kant had described as universally human was, according to Bourdieu, an attitude that presupposes time, education and distance from necessity, and it was used to mark class differences. Taste, he wrote, classifies the classifier. After Bourdieu it was difficult to speak of good taste without also asking whose taste it was.
Around the turn of the millennium, critics sought new ways of understanding art that no longer consisted of objects. In Relational Aesthetics (1998) Nicolas Bourriaud described artists who created encounters, meals and social situations rather than works to be looked at. Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, in which she sat silently opposite visitors one by one, became one of the most talked-about examples of an art whose content is the encounter itself. Critics have, however, asked whether the social situations that arise in museums are really as open and democratic as the theory claims. At the same time, the art world has become global. Biennials and large recurring exhibitions such as documenta in Kassel, which began in 1955, now show art from all over the world, and the Western canon on which aesthetics long rested has been challenged from many directions.
Meanwhile, beauty has returned as a question. In the 1990s critics and philosophers such as Dave Hickey and Elaine Scarry defended beauty against an art world that had regarded it with suspicion, and the British philosopher Roger Scruton argued that beauty is a fundamental human need, not least in architecture. Today there is discussion of everyday aesthetics, of the aesthetics of nature and the environment, and of aesthetics in cultures other than the Western, as the next chapter shows. The long history from Plato and Vitruvius thus ends not with an answer but with a multitude of questions, in which the old concepts of harmony, taste, the sublime and function are still used, questioned and reinterpreted.