Beauty has had a rough time in the 20th century.
"For a great many of the most important Artists in the west, beauty and aesthetics have been of secondary concern"
"The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty." - Barneyt Newman 1948 (abstract expressionist)
"sought to free themselves from the shackles of centuries of aesthetic tradition and expectation"
1997 Documenta X (gallery) "been a barometer of current thinking about art"
"became unusually controversial when the organiser, the respected French curator Catherine David, explicitly and self-consciously limited her selection to artists whose work featured a critical political sensibility at the expense of aesthetics." painting virtually absent from exhibition. no work that could be labelled as formal.
ArtForum published an article "characterising the anti-aesthetic bias of the exhibition"
"for many critics and curators, aesthetic value in contemporary art is today necessarily divorced from meaning"
Vanessa Beecroft - Italian born, NY-based artist. 23/4/98 'Show' closed to the public. 20 models, 15 wore red bikinis, the rest wore just shoes. noted in the press release of the event: "by changing the context in which the viewer sees the models - from magazine, billboard, television or runway to art institution - Beecroft transforms the models into 'ready-mades' of beauty."
one view point: beauty and aesthetics disparaged, politicised and "inappropriate for artistic investigation"
other view point: embrace and except beauty but find new ways to challenge it. "not considered traditional aesthetic ideal... but rather, a complex cultural construct, inseparable from contemporary attitudes towards the human body, sex, and mass media."
the vast difference between these two viewpoints highlights the difficult position beauty occupies in art of today.
Duchamp: much contested.
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