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Home · Art & Culture

Must a Work of Art Be Beautiful?

An aesthetics dissertation note. The problem: is beauty the goal, the criterion, or the condition of art? History shows, on the contrary, a progressive divorce between the two. (After the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Beauty,” “Aesthetic Judgment,” “Environmental Aesthetics.”)

Stating the problem

Spontaneously, we expect a work of art to be beautiful — beauty seems to be its vocation. But this obviousness cracks as soon as we notice two facts:

  1. We make aesthetic judgments about things that are not art (a sunset, a bird in flight) → beauty overflows art.
  2. Many major works do not aim at beauty (conceptual art, Dada, “morally” engaged art) → art overflows beauty.

The question, then, is not “what is beauty?” but: is beauty necessary, sufficient, or even desirable for art to succeed?

I. The classical thesis: yes, art aims at beauty (objectivism)

Thesis: beauty is an objective property of things, and art is its production par excellence.

  • Argument: from Antiquity to the eighteenth century, beauty was held to be a real quality (proportion, harmony, radiance). Plato (Symposium) and Plotinus (Enneads I, 6) locate it in participation in the Idea: all the beauty of this world comes through communion in the Ideal Form. Augustine (De Vera Religione) settles the matter: things are not beautiful because they please — they please because they are beautiful.
  • Consequence for art: Hegel (Aesthetics, 1835) even makes artistic beauty a higher beauty than that of nature, because it is “born of spirit”; Croce (1928) goes so far as to deny that nature is truly beautiful. Here art is the proper home of beauty.

II. The subjective turn: beauty is in the eye (the judgment of taste)

Thesis: beauty is not in the object but in the subject who experiences it — hence the weakening of the “duty to be beautiful.”

  • Hume, Of the Standard of Taste (1757): “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.” But Hume rescues normativity through the figure of the true critic (a refined, practiced sense, free of prejudice) and the test of time (the lasting veneration of Homer).
  • Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790): the judgment of taste is subjective (grounded in a pleasure) but claims universality: I do not merely state my preference, I demand the agreement of others. Three decisive features:
    • disinterestedness: the pleasure of the beautiful is independent of desire (neither utility nor possession);
    • subjective universality: “he demands it of others; he blames them if they judge differently”;
    • free vs. dependent beauty: “a beautiful ox would make an ugly horse” — free beauty (a flower, an abstract ornament) rests on pure form, without a concept.
  • Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896): beauty is “objectified pleasure” — we attribute to the object a state that is really our own. Beauty becomes almost “a kind of error.”

Turning point: if the beautiful is a subjective pleasure, it “does not seem to have a higher status than what amuses or distracts” — it loses its rank alongside the true and the just. This opens the door to its abandonment by art.

III. The twentieth century: art dismisses beauty

Thesis: not only can art do without beauty, it must at times reject it.

  • The sublime is not the beautiful: before immensity or power (the Kantian sublime), there is artistic excellence without beauty (e.g., John Martin’s Apocalypse). A work’s value can be cognitive, moral, political — not aesthetic in the sense of the pretty.
  • Dada / the avant-gardes: Max Ernst: “For us, Dada was above all a moral reaction (…) my works were not made to seduce, but to make people scream.” Duchamp and conceptual art shift value toward the idea, against the “retina.”
  • Ideological critique — Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970): beauty is suspected of complicity with the established order. “Art must take the side of what is proscribed as ugly (…) in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces ugliness in its own image.” To make the world pretty is to mask it.
  • Political critiques: beauty associated with power (rococo aristocracy, <span class=“lien-absent”>Leni Riefenstahl</span> and Nazi aesthetics), with the male gaze (Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975: “It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article”), with the norm (Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 1991). Even logical positivism (Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 1952) declares aesthetic judgments devoid of objective validity.

IV. Contemporary rehabilitations: beauty defended

Thesis: since the 1990s, several philosophers have rehabilitated beauty — without returning to naive objectivism.

  • Dave Hickey (1993): “the issue of the nineties will be beauty.”
  • Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (2003): traces this decline and argues for reintegrating beauty among other aesthetic qualities, without making it the sole criterion.
  • Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness (2007): beauty is a promise, “an invitation to new experiences,” irreducibly social: “beauty creates smaller societies” — it never commands universal agreement.
  • Roger Scruton, Beauty (2009); Mothersill, Beauty Restored (1984): manifesto-titles of this return.

V. The argument from environmental aesthetics: beauty is not the preserve of art

A field born in the 1960s against the “art-centered” bias of aesthetics (Hegel, and Beardsley, Aesthetics, 1958: “there would be no problems of aesthetics if no one ever talked about works of art”).

  • Founding text: Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty” (1966): nature deserves aesthetic appreciation according to principles of its own, not imported from art. Kant already gave priority to natural beauty.
  • Cognitivism — Allen Carlson (“natural environmental model,” 1979): appreciating nature properly requires scientific knowledge (geology, ecology), just as appreciating Guernica requires knowing it is a Cubist work. Hence positive aesthetics: “all of nature, properly seen, is beautiful” (there is no ugliness in nature) — the exact opposite of the picturesque, which relished only “views.”
  • Non-cognitivism: Noël Carroll (“being moved by nature,” 1993, emotion suffices); Arnold Berleant (“aesthetics of engagement,” rejecting disinterestedness in favor of multisensory immersion).

Bearing on our question: one can experience the beautiful and the sublime before what is not art. So beauty is not the essence of art — at best one of its possible dimensions.

Conclusion (a nuanced answer)

  • Beauty is neither necessary nor sufficient for art: not sufficient (a beautiful object is not ipso facto a work of art), not necessary (the sublime, deliberate ugliness, the conceptual all make art without beauty).
  • But abandoning it entirely leaves art without pleasure or form — hence the recent rehabilitations.
  • A defensible position: beauty is one artistic value, neither the only one nor the highest. The right criterion for a work is not “is it pretty?” but “does it succeed as a work?” — which can happen through beauty, the sublime, or even avowed ugliness.
  • A contemporary echo: François Bégaudeau reverses Adorno’s suspicion by arguing that “the more something is art, the more it is political” and that beauty is on the side of politics, not its obstacle — against the activist idea that a work should be ugly “so as not to undermine the message.”

Index

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