draining's Diaryland
Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Beauty, 2006
BEAUTY
I�ve been accused of liking art that is ugly and alienating. Maybe that�s because I myself � and a lot of other people � feel ugly and alienated. Anyway, I don�t even know what that means. I have written on my bedroom wall a seminal quote from the riot grrrl punk band Bikini Kill: �I�m so sorry if I�m alienating some of you/ Your whole fucking culture alienates me!� Dave Hickey discusses Robert Mapplethorpe. Is Mapplethorpe�s photo of a man inserting his little finger into his urethra ugly and alienating? Well, yes. I mean, he could get a nasty infection doing that. The fact that it is also beautiful is actually pretty disturbing. Mapplethorpe had that edge going.
Photographs about war zones and disasters are horrific yet many have this haunting beauty. Susan Sontag and others have written about the numbing quality of images of pain and the betrayal of human morals when they seem beautiful. What exactly IS beauty? When I was twelve years old, I felt ugly as sin. Now when I look at pictures of myself at 12, I see an exquisitely beautiful little girl verging on womanhood. Am I as beautiful now, but I just FEEL ugly? It�s not an original idea but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, when it comes to art and people.
Art involves the viewer. It�s some kind of this pact with the viewer. In a digital age, art is interactive and the viewer isn�t passive. The viewer is transformed. Peter Schjedahl talks about that in Notes on Beauty, how �beauty may be a mental solvent that dissolves something else, melting it into radiance.�
11:04 p.m. - 2006-01-31
0 comments
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
previous - next
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|