What would you consider the relationship is between art and beauty?

Question

Love is always beautiful; if it is ugly it is not love. So why is art considered beautiful even if it is down right ugly?
What do you consider art? How do you perceive beauty? I have been trying to answer these questions for months and have gotten nowhere. I would really like to have some heart felt answers please, not something copied from a website, but written from the heart and mind of the writer.

Answer 1

Art is an expression of feeling, an outpouring of the soul, if you will. As feelings are not always beautiful nor even socially acceptable, so it is with art as well. My guess is that for much of humankind beautiful feelings number less than 50% of all feelings. Would you want to quell all of the larger portion of human feeling just because it is not beautiful? That smacks of Orwellian logic, and in fact Big Brother has made this attempt more than once. He has always failed and always will because the human spirit craves expression and if suppressed for any length of time will build in pressure until it finds an outlet even if it must explode like a volcano. In other words suppression of expression just leads to more and more intensive or even violent expression. How many totalitarian societies have had to relearn this lesson the hard way? No, not all art is beautiful nor need it be. Beautiful art is just one small subcategory of art among many. Keats had it wrong. Beauty is not truth, nor truth beauty. But allowed free expression art may approximate truth. Sadly, it can never reach that lofty goal because liars and scoundrels of sundry other sorts use art for purposes other than pure expression, turning it to their own self-aggrandizing nefarious schemes. So we get, for example, propagandist art, some of which may actually be beautiful in its own way and subverts the masses with that very beauty. Even art originally created as pure expression with the best of intentions may be repackaged this way so that what was once beautiful turns ugly or at very least is forced to serve as the handmaiden of ugliness. This becomes quite a complex subject, does it not?

Answer 2

Well, I would need to know why you felt a particular piece of art is "ugly."

Is it just not pleasing to the eyes?

Does it stir up dark or negative emotions/memories, so you consider it ugly?

For me, art captures "truth" in a new way that can be understood not just on the intellectual level.

It can be a literal truth -- such as a realistic pencil drawing of an old man or whatever -- if it is perfectly crafted. The craftsmanship in this case is art to me, and beautiful.

There is also a physical reaction -- the aesthetic. I can find both pleasant and disturbing pieces of art to be "beautiful" (although I usually call the disturbing ones "haunting" instead). An example of the latter would be the works of Giger (who, as his most well-known achievement, designed the Alien creature for the series of movies). His art is just creepy, but I can't look away.

In any case, beautiful art is evocative, and art that can generate spontaneous feelings in the audience is effective.

Finally, art for me is usually a deep philosophical truth about life, captured in the work itself. Often the most powerful truths for me are the bittersweet ones.

I can watch a movie about the breakdown of a family (such as "The Squid and the Whale") and find it 'beautiful' in that it was honest to real life, despite how terrible some of the behavior is. Or American Beauty, which depicts the same sort of stuff -- deep truth encapsulated in agonzing relationships.

Or I can find "Passion of the Christ" beautiful in its own way, despite many people not being able to stomach it -- because the artistry involved and the level of sacrifice being shown is a deep truth.

As far as your comparison of love and art and ugly/beautiful, that's a really interesting question.

I think it comes down to this:

Art can be executed well and still be disturbing/ugly, so you can respect it for the craftsmanship at some level if it is well done or creates the sort of feeling you were hoping for inside.

Love cannot be executed well and NOT be love. If loving isn't done "right," it's now hate, not love. People do not want to experience the feelings that hate generates. There is nothing to respect; and everything to loathe..

(As an extreme example, I suppose some people can "respect the Nazis" for their efficiency and whatever, but the majority of people find what they did to be loathsome.)

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Taking a slightly different tact, and a specific example: You can take a child/person who is deformed in some way and unsettling/ugly to look at, and show them enacting a specific act of kindness and beauty of spirit, and thus you can find the person beautiful to the heart even if the eye is unsettled by what it sees.

Answer 3

It is well written that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", otherwise ugly men and women would never marry. As for ART, just go to an art gallery where the so called experts have awarded first prize, then see if they have a peoples choice. I guarantee you it will never be the same choice. The ARCHIBALD Art prize in Australia is a prime example. Also look at architechs awards for buildings/houses, no one else would give the ones with an award an award. Look at fashion awards, most people consider them rubbish. To me there is outer and inner beauty , what you see and what you feel, sometimes the two never meet.

Answer 4

the relation is that they are both in the eyes of the beholder. i also think that love can be ugly. i believe hate is a negative love that blinds people and confuses them. we should love all and everything but it's not easy to do that so most people choose apathy and it's taught so that we don't get hurt. but getting hurt is good so that we learn how to improve and if we didn't feel the pain then the pleasure would be dull to the point of not feeling much at all.

Answer 5

Art accomplishes beauty
Beauty accomplishes art