Truth, Justice, Beauty: the three highest goods, right? And for each of them, a human state or activity, with that good as its proper aim. Knowledge aims at truth; virtue, at justice; and art, at beauty.
This may be wrong, throughout; but a useful corrective to the last, is Arthur Danto’s book The Abuse of Beauty. Good art need not be beautiful: this was a lesson learned late, a hard-learned lesson of Modernism and Post-Modernism. In Danto’s characteristically serpentine train of thought, the conclusion is overdetermined. There is, for one thing, the idea, due to Clement Greenberg and now passé, that each artistic medium had its own proprietary goal, “purifying the medium...of whatever was extrinsic to it.” Paintings, therefore, should not aim to be “of beautiful things,” they should instead “be purged of illusionism of any kind,” for “flatness is what is unique to the medium.” Thus, Cezanne turning mountains into patches of color, and the more extreme deconstructions in cubist works.
Flatness and formalism aside, Danto’s main case against beauty, as the aim of art, is Duchamp’s discovery that a work of art can be indiscernible from an “ordinary thing,” that is, a non-artwork. This discovery, of course, was later amplified by Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement, and today art museums advertise collections containing snow shovels, Brillo boxes, and the like. Now Danto is famous in philosophy for endorsing the converse: for any non-artwork you like, there could be a work of art indiscernible from it:
I found it philosophically thrilling to realize that nothing outward need distinguish a work of art from the most ordinary of objects or events—that a dance can consist in nothing more remarkable than sitting still, that whatever one hears can be music—even silence.
More, an artwork like that could be great, could even be a masterpiece. It’s a small step from here, to art does not aim at beauty: one need only observe the adulation applied, in some quarters, to works of art indiscernible from things that are “ordinary” in both senses: neither works of art, nor particularly beautiful.
As an aside, Danto tells a fun story about how little art might aim at, when these lessons are applied relentlessly. He quotes a 1969 interview with “the artist Douglas Huebner,” who said: