The Plague Crucifix

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.

Plantoir, Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen.

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:

I’ve stopped making objects, and I’m not trying to take anything away from the world. Nor am I trying to restructure the world. I’m not trying to tell the world anything, really...I’m just, you know, touching the world by doing these things, and leaving it pretty much the way it is.

This is a dispiriting speech, for a philosopher. Wittgenstein famously said that philosophy “leaves everything as it is,” but doing this was, and remains, hard work, sometimes decades of frustrating intellectual labor. Meanwhile, when artists discover that they can produce art while “leaving everything pretty much the way it is,” well, they just sprinkle some fairy dust and kick of early for lunch.

Of course, two things can be true: art need not aim at beauty; and, beauty remains a worthy goal for artists to pursue. So why did “avant-garde” art, which thought of itself as pushing art forward, so often aim so deliberately at ugliness? Because, in the ideology of those they were rebelling against, beauty had a “moral weight.” G. E. Moore was into this idea, and his statements of it were influential. Danto quotes this bit:

that which is meant by beautiful is simply and solely that which is an end in itself. The object of art would then be that to which the objects of Morals are means, and the only thing to which they are means. The only reason for having virtues would be to produce works of art.

I added those italics, in a fit of exclamation. I’ll go to the mat for the importance of art in a human life, but—its production is “the only reason for having virtues”? Slow down! Anyway, if the gurus of your time were saying such things, you too might “[find] it so urgent to dislodge beauty from its mistaken place in the philosophy of art,” and only by being shunned could it be dethroned.

G. E. Moore wrote in the 1910s, 1920s, but I wonder how much a similar dialectic explains punk’s often relentless interest in making ugly music. Maybe not much? Not all ugly art is a “statement” in a meta-debate about the place of beauty in the arts. Sometimes, ugliness is just appropriate to the subject of, or emotion in, the work. If good art need not be beautiful, also ugliness can help make art good. And so I imagine, for example, that Neil Young chose an ugly distorted guitar tone for “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” because it made the song better, and not for any deeper or higher reason; ditto, the assaultive distortion on the breaks in Radiohead’s “Creep.”

That good art might be ugly, I said, was “a lesson learned late, a hard-learned lesson of Modernism and Post-Modernism,” but that’s not true, nor does Danto himself believe it. It was just a lesson “we” learned late; we, in a wise one’s words, had to “unlearn what we had learned.” Danto mentions art from outside the western tradition:

The Victorians had thought that “primitive peoples” were, in making art, trying to make beautiful objects, only they did not now exactly how—hence their “primitivity.” The Edwardians [American translation: early 20th century] thought themselves advanced because formalism enabled them to see what Fry called “Negro sculpture” as beautiful. But they were wrong in thinking that they had learned through formalism to see the beauty that was the point of African art. That was never its point, nor was beauty the point of much of the world’s great art. It is very rarely the point of art today.

Danto’s book is short, so he does not bring up medieval European art, but well he might. For as the middle ages progressed, the medievals became increasingly interested in showing and contemplating the death of Jesus, as the agonizing death of a human being. Early medieval crucifixion scenes tended to show Christ triumphant on the cross, but by the high and late periods it was the “complete dereliction” Jesus that drew interest:

Christ is shown with no beauty or dignity, and sometimes without any exterior sign of his divinity beyond the usual halo around his head; he is (to all appearance) a common criminal, abandoned to a horrifying death. (Richard Vilahdesau, The Beauty of the Cross)

The most gruesome of these may be the “plague crosses” in Cologne:

Neither medieval artists, nor medieval culture, thought of art as autonomous, an “end in itself.” What we call medieval art was made for devotional or pedagogical purposes, not for some pure act of aesthetic contemplation. So “internal aesthetic” factors likely play a minor role, in explaining the shift from Christ Triumphant to Christ Suffering. Not no role—a move toward “realism” in medieval painting must have been important. That accepted, what were the other factors in the shift? Vilahdesau writes,

We might cite the influence of Franciscan preaching...the sense of guilt inspired by the midcentury scourge of the plague...and the increasing “humanistic” and empirical emphasis on sensation and feeling in general.

These factors are non-aesthetic, and two of them are also “external,” to the place of contemplating the crucifixion in Christian practice. I wish I knew more about the third kind of factor, also not aesthetic, but still internal. If the “forsaken” Jesus was always a proper object of Christian piety, did it just take time, and the passing through of prior stages, for Christianity to fully grasp its importance?