[lit-ideas] Re: Beauty, anyone?

  • From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:53:34 -0800


On Feb 19, 2007, at 10:16 AM, Paul Stone wrote:

On 2/19/07, Eric <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ritchie's better qualified to address part of this.) Two friends -- one
a prizewinning poet, the other a professor at CalArts -- got into it one
night at a party. The professor (a charming Australian woman who makes
installations)
perhaps "makes installations" is a tell.
[snip]
convinced that art is never 'built',

Nehamas and Stone--now there's a name for some kind of group--are hung up on the old idea of art, of a thing which you put in a cathedral or your home and contemplate from time to time. This thing may have awe in it, or beauty, or mystery... something that gives it a bit of long-term value, something that makes repeated visits worthwhile. The more contemporary view is that art is a conversation much like this one, to which folk make both elegant and clumsy contributions, one measure of which [contributions] will be , "Do they advance my understanding?"

Or that at least is a sketch version of how things have been explained to me. In this art world an elegant thing which adds nothing new to the conversation is little valued, an ugly and clumsy piece which has something to say may be disliked but it might possible get attention, and most work gets no attention whatsoever. Meanwhile people continue to buy art as if it served the earlier function and disparage art that could never serve this function, installations and performances for example.

Where do I stand on all this? I think the curator of modern art at our museum is being silly when he calls impressionist and post-impressionist paintings "pretty things," and much of what he has put on view leaves me cold. But that art should engage the head as well as sensibilities is surely not in doubt. And the longer I live and work among artists, the wider my understanding of what is beautiful becomes.

People who dismiss beauty as irrelevant, are to me like people who think suffering is more interesting than joy--misled by three squares a day.

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon

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