The Twentieth Century

Movement in the scientific and technological domain is, with few exceptions, progressive. Theories and inventions build on one another. They are exercises in objectivity. In the arts of the twentieth century, however, the movement is toward degrees of subjectivity—indeed subjectivism. The terms Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Purism, Minimalism and Realism designate theoretical art. Neither art nor aesthetics focus on beauty and craft, although artists classified under those names had eyes for beauty and made things well. But beauty and craft are less important than individual expression, creativity, reversal, art from "inside," and shock. Art remains an idea, art, not the idea made flesh, but the Gnostic attenuation of matter (or content) along with the insider aspect of Gnosticism, i.e., an appeal to those in the know.

When subjectivism exists not only for self-gratification but also for public consumption, it must be rationalized or justified, i.e., reasons must be given and accepted as to why its products should be considered as art. The flight from objectivity is short. A pragmatist philosopher such as John Dewey, for example, must appeal to the practicality and usefulness of art in an enlightened democracy. And indeed many of the philosophers writing about beauty and art in the twentieth century, excluding Marxists and postmodernists, repeat the standard criteria of beauty and art: beauty means pleasing to perception and intellection, and the work of art must exhibit unity, coherence, harmony and splendor of form, i.e., criteria that are publicly recognizable.

With the Marxists beauty and art are politicized, seen in relation to social justice. Beauty and art ought not and cannot be disassociated from politics, according to Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Both they and Jean-Paul Sartre maintain that art must be committed, and commitment means bringing about the Socialist revolution by any means possible and all means necessary. On the other hand, Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is not a distraction from social justice but a preparation for it. For Martin Heidegger, however, the important relationship is that between beauty and truth, i.e., truth as the disclosure of being whereby beauty is one way the disclosure occurs. Jacques Derrida, too, is concerned with truth in painting—particularly how the frame of the painting affects its truth. Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Roger Scrunton are traditionalist and premodern in their aesthetics but attend to the presentation of ugliness as beautiful. Umberto Eco, although a postmodernist in tendency, calls himself a Thomist, partly in jest, since he is more probably an Ockhamist. Yet he gives a straightforward account of the medieval discussion of the distinction between beauty and goodness.

To grasp postmodernist thinking about beauty and art, we must understand that it implies both rejection of modernity's rationalism and an acceptance of an unfettered will. Expressiveness and originality count, as do indeed, satire and debunking. What is beautiful, i.e., pleasing to the modernist and postmodernist mind, is to shock the bourgeoisie, whose own pleasure resides in being a party to the establishment.