RF2a: Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics KF

Aesthetics and anti-aesthetics

The cult of the ugly
- KF

What consitutes the beautiful? Beauty is culturally specific, different backgrounds

Don't tend to question beauty very much

Perfection

Health

Storng associations between the ideas of beauty and truth

Absolute value that everybody shares

Learn from an early age what is right for a us what gives us pleasure and protection

Opposite binary

Distinction between good and evil - stories and fables help us make moral judgements

Ugliness is beauty waiting to be redeemed - beauty and beast

Underneath a beautiful exterior is a working body complicated

Cubism begins to disfigure beauty

----Paul McCarthy, Painter, 1995--- have a look

Philsophy of Aesthetics:

What constitues beauty

Immanuel Kant - Critique of Judgement, 1780

- believes aesthetic judgements have 4 features

- disinterested (something gives pleasure because it is deemed beautiful, not the other way around)

- universal (I expect others to agree with me)

- necessary (and a product of the mind)

Hegel

Harmony, proportion, the ideal human body, youth, perfection, symmetry

Theorists, artists, practitioners interested in extending the idea of aestheitcs - relationships between classical structures and modern mechanical structures and tools.

(Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture)

Dada, Anti-Art:

spaces that are brutal, rough, rude, inflict untold damage on the human body, man made structures, natural structures.

World war, wars and violence has always done this. Scale

Paris Dada, New York Dada - anti art gestures, cannons of beauty

Replacing representations of the virgin mary - spontaneous connotations of a sexual charge deliberately insulting

Marcel Duchamp, deface work and make it your own. the speed in which one can deface cannons of beauty

Berlin Dada - showing things like ex soldiers with limbs missing, vile facial disfigurments, transgressions against beauty, horror of living through the first world war