Why aesthetic power matters
even when the art world no longer cares about it
If you’re a painter or a composer or a poet, you can make dismissive comments about beauty - even say you hate it - and nobody is shocked. The audience even expects hostility.
Ted Gioia: 2.6.25
Aesthetics are out of fashion in the contemporary art world, and have been for a long time. According to a list of ‘threshold concepts’1 articulated in 2011 by a Scottish art lecturer, one of the first aims in teaching contemporary art is to shift students perceptions from ‘aesthetic to conceptual awareness’. I’m no expert on the history of contemporary art, but I witnessed this move first hand at St Martin’s School of Art in the 1970s, and I can also see that when the Diploma in Fine Art became a degree (in the early 1970s in the UK) it was inevitable that things would have to become more cerebral.
This shift has bothered me profoundly all of my life. As you’ll know if you’ve read any of my writing over the last few months, my bewilderment about the move away from aesthetics became one of the main drivers of my life, as I found myself engaging with a range of cultural perspectives and practices which were completely different to my own. I’m all for students having their positions and conditioning challenged and drawn attention to, but, to this day, I find the idea of taking the aesthetic out of art just plain weird.
Of course, I’m writing entirely about my own bias, a bias that matters to me.
In times past, and in some places still today, aesthetic forms were used to call in and work with different types of power. Such images continue to be used in Ethiopia and by Native Americans to facilitate rituals of healing. Byzantine Christianity created vast glittering church interiors, and smaller golden icons; Indian temples contain images created to exact aesthetic standards designed to attract God to descend so that worshippers can talk directly to her/him. Rangoli2 are made in India daily and for special occasions on the threshold of the doorway to a house, in order to attract and honour particular powers.
In these contexts, images are used and made as a dynamic part of being embedded in a living whole, which is regularly acknowledged and celebrated. Marks, shapes and colours were and are understood for the potential power that they hold.
Many people are, of course, beyond God these days. I certainly am. I ‘believe’ only in the leaf budding on a branch, the moon pulling the tides once again away from the shore. But what if it was possible to think of God as simply human awareness of all that is beyond us, in which we’re embedded, on which we depend? Don’t aesthetic powers still work on the human psyche/emotional body, despite the Enlightenment, despite art school condemnation?
Human nervous systems are increasingly challenged; the pace of life as many people now know it has every little gap, every possibility for boredom or reflection, filled in with internet activity. The internet floods people not only with compelling trivia that promises to give them the relief or connection they crave, but also minute by minute accounts of the extent of human suffering across the whole world. Nervous systems are heaving with stress hormones, often unable to properly rest, becoming more and more compulsive in their search for escape from it all.
The basics of many current theories about stress suggest that a nervous system that’s in a constant state of alert needs to regularly toggle back into a state of non-alert in order to stay healthy; to repeatedly come back to whatever might allow the system to rest, relax, and feel joyful and connected. Without this regular toggling, the biological system starts to develop symptoms of chronic stress, affecting sleep, mood, relationships and long-term health3. The effects of increasing lack of connection, and cycles of escalating activation as people attempt to self-medicate with social media, can be seen everywhere - in our lives, in the lives of our families and friends, in our wider social groups.4
Beauty, colour, shape, line, sound, movement (in music, theatre, all the arts) can create a place to rest, to recover. Something happens in humans when they encounter music, when they dance, when they receive or make art. Aesthetic resonance not only makes a place of safety, of relief, of refreshment, it also pulls us out of our ego-silos into our bodies, and the wide and aesthetically staggering reality of the non-backlit world.
There’s so much interest in AI, in faster phones, in sexier computing, but little talk of the electricity and water that superfast everything requires, and the destruction of the planet that this entails. Humans are spending more and more time seduced by online environments where everything is smoothed out, flattened, filled in evenly and perfectly. And yet we still don’t even understand how a particular plant emerges into form, or how a bird navigates from one side of the planet to another. The constantly surprising magnificence of the breathing world is everywhere, and it’s free. Humans don’t need a damn thing to feel its blessing, or a lot of time to feel what happens when they open to its reality.
This is why we need art, of all kinds. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but making and feeling aesthetic creations can help humans in so many ways; help us to see, help us to understand and connect. Ground us in our flesh and show us what needs to be done.
https://thoughtsonartandteaching.blogspot.com/2011/12/ten-threshold-concepts-in-fine-art.html#axzz22TVYVnXD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangoli
Current perspectives on trauma and the body from the last decade or so include Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, and Kimberley Johnson.
I’m not referencing these claims because from what I’ve been reading on Substack for the last few months, these things are so well-established that I don’t think they can really be refuted as general trends, with obvious exceptions.