This is part of a really beautiful poetry series that describes the "room of one's own" (via V Woolf) as an essential part of having enough time/space to make thiings. Interesting visual to add to the debate how private VS public space as a catalyst for making.  

 

 

 

Source: http://jezebel.com/5799064/the-bechdel-test-and-classic-literature

Image: Image via Kuzma/Shutterstock.com

Text: Frank Kovarik: May 5, 2011 6:30 PM

This post originally appeared at Occasional Planet.

The Bechdel Test And Classic Literature

By Frank Kovarik —

In a recent New Yorker article about actress Anna Faris, Tad Friend cites a test for gender bias in movies. The test, outlined by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip (Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the original idea), asks three simple questions:

Does a movie contain two or more female characters who have names? Do those characters talk to each other? And, if so, do they discuss something other than a man?

I was struck by the simplicity of this test and by its patent validity as a measure of gender bias. As I thought about it some more, it occurred to me how few of the classic works of literature that I teach to my high school freshmen would pass this test: The Odyssey? Nope. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass? Nope. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Nope. Romeo and Juliet. Nope.

What's wrong with me?

***

For the past two months, I've been working my way through War and Peace. I'm about three-fourths of the way through right now, and I'm both exhausted and exhilarated by the experience. Richard Pevear is not exaggerating when he writes the following in the introduction to his and Larissa Volokhonsky's 2007 translation of the novel:

War and Peace is the most famous and at the same time the most daunting of Russian novels, as vast as Russia itself and as long to cross from one end to the other. Yet if one makes the journey, the sights seen and the people met on the way mark one's life forever.

Tolstoy, as a writer, is alive to seemingly everything, from the heights of military and political power to the most ordinary details of everyday life. As Isaac Babel noted, "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy."

Yet even War and Peace passes Bechdel and Wallace's test only barely. I've read 935 pages so far, and I've encountered quite a few female characters. Only occasionally have they talked to each other, however. Even rarer are the times when they've talked about something other than a man.

What's wrong with Tolstoy?

***

Decades after film critic David Denby graduated from Columbia University, he went back to his alma mater and took the Great Books course over again. He wrote a book about the experience. Near the end of the class's study of The Odyssey, Denby became uneasy with the brutal treatment of the disloyal serving women, who are hanged by Telemachus after he forces them to clear out the corpses of their lovers recently slaughtered by Odysseus.

This brutal execution — which inspired Margaret Atwood to write The Penelopiad, a re-telling of The Odyssey from the perspective of Odysseus' wife — is given tacit approval in Homer's epic. Denby is appalled:

In Homer's terms, of course, the women belong to Odysseus and Telemachus; the men's property has been sullied, and as Odysseus' heir, Telemachus has a right to exact punishment, and that's that….

O evil patriarchy! I was outraged.

Yet Denby, guided by Professor Edward Tayler, comes to see his outrage in a different light:

A book like the Odyssey can never be simply appropriated by one social view or the other; it's too complex, it bursts one's little critique (which in any case is only everyone else's little critique.) The slaughter of the suitors and the serving girls is a morally disastrous moment in Western literature, but having said that, one also has to say that criticism of the Odyssey on feminist and moral grounds is largely beside the point. It would be hard to say the poem suffers as art from its patriarchal assumptions.

So wait — is Bechdel's test "beside the point"?

Is there nothing wrong with Homer, or with Tolstoy, or with me?

***

In the past fifty years or so, more and more intellectual work has been done, both in the academy and outside of it, to lay bare the ways in which our society — our culture, literature, art, politics, religion, even the most mundane details of our everyday lives — are biased in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and class.

One response to that work has been to sneeringly reject it as bleeding-heart claptrap, as whining political correctness.

More sensitive souls have seen the insights of this work and used them to examine their own consciences — or the consciences of the literary works they admire.

No doubt this process has led to some salutary results. Some people may have amended their patterns of sexist, racist, classist, or heterosexist behavior. Others may have come to see their favorite literary works in new and illuminating ways. Consciousness, to one degree or another, may have been raised.

But this type of examination of conscience can also take on a less salutary aspect: a more defensive posture, a desire to absolve.

Scholar Jeffrey B. Ferguson, in an article in the Winter 2011 issue of Dædalus, speaks to this issue when he writes of the post-civil rights period's "public drama of continuing black anger, the notion of ‘pulling the race card,' and the seemingly bottomless need from whites for confirmation from blacks that racism no longer exists, or at the very least that they as individuals bear no visible trace of the unspeakable sin."

On a literary level, I know how this works: Having been challenged at various times about teaching Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a novel that some parents consider racially insensitive, I have labored long and hard and, I like to believe, successfully, to prove that Huck is an anti-racist novel and that Jim is not a racist caricature but instead a moral hero.

And yet, when I think of Bechdel's test, I realize that such defensive interpretations — both of self and of texts — are also "beside the point."

It's just a different point.

***

When I realized that even War and Peace, a novel so vast, all-encompassing, profound, and moving, presents a seriously diminished portrait of the lives of women, I began to see that the deeper point of Bechdel's test is not to accuse Homer, or Tolstoy, or me of being sexist.

Instead, the test reminds us that biases like sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism are the water in which we swim. They pervade our culture. They are our culture, and to such an extent that we sometimes forget about them until someone like Bechdel reminds us.

Instead of seeing sexism — or racism, etc. — as "unspeakable sins" whose taint one must avoid at all costs, maybe it would be healthier to accept that it would be virtually impossible for an individual not to be thus tainted — in other words, to see these sins as not unspeakable but rather common as dirt.

Then, aware of our common dirtiness, we can get down to the business of studying how things get dirty, how dirtiness causes problems, and how, struggle though we may, we can never get ourselves or anything else permanently clean.

Source: http://www.jstor.org.prxy4.ursus.maine.edu/stable/3810979?seq=1

Image: Titian's Rape of Europa (1559-62, oil on canvas, 178.7 x 202.5 cm, Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, Boston)

Text: Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian's Rape of EuropaAuthor(s): A. W. EatonSource: Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4, Women, Art, and Aesthetics (Autumn - Winter, 2003), pp.159-188Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810979 .Accessed: 02/05/2011 18:27

Where Ethics and Aesthetics Meet: Titian's Rape of Europa
A. W. EATON

Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures.
B ut the paintingh as an overlookedd arks ide, namelyt hat it eroticizesr ape.
I arguet hat this is an ethicald efectt hat diminishesth e paintinga estheticallyT. his
argument-that an artworkc an be worseo ff qua worko f art preciselyb ecausei t is
somehowe thicallyp roblematic-demonstratetsh atf eministc oncernsa bouta rt can
play a legitimater olei n art criticisma nd aesthetica ppreciation.

Titian's Rape of Europa (1559-62, oil on canvas, 178.7 x 202.5 cm, Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, Boston) is often touted as the greatest Italian Renaissance
painting hanging in an American collection. It is also considered one of Titian's
finest works, and it's not hard to see why. The painting is rightfully praised for
its subtle modulations of luminous colors and its wide array of palpably sensual
textures. If this were all there were to the painting, then its univocal acclaim
and pride of place in the canon would be entirely justified. But this virtuosic
display of lustrous colors and shiny textures has a dark side, namely that the
paintinge roticizesa nd celebratesr ape.I shall arguet hat this constitutesa n ethical
defect, and further, that this defect diminishes the painting aesthetically.'
The general position defended here is a modified version of ethicism, the view
that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is ethically
problematic.2(M y modificationsb ecome apparentl ater in this essay.)
I make an argument for ethicism in two stages. First, I examine Titian's
painting in some detail in order to reveal its particular kind of ethical flaw. It
will be important to look at the painting closely because the second part of the
paper demonstrates the artistic relevance of this flaw, and this can only be done
convincingly if we have a sense of how the painting works aesthetically.

I. THE PAINTING

The painting depicts a scene from the following mythological story.3 Europa,
daughter of the king of Tyre, used to play with her companions on the sands
where her father's cattle were taken down to the shore. Jupiter became infatuated
with the maiden, donned the disguise of an alluring snow-white bull with
gleaming horns, and approached the lovely Europa. He frolicked and played
about until the maiden was thoroughly charmed and her fears allayed. First
the trusting Europa placed a garland of flowers upon his horns, and then, finding
him such a docile and sweet creature, ventured to mount him. Once the
maiden was coaxed into climbing onto his back, Jupiter bolted for the sea and
carried his frightened prize off to Crete. This is the moment of the story that
Titian's painting depicts: the bull carries Europa away from the shore where her
companions (left behind) appear to call after her and a lone cow looks on.

What happens next? Most literary versions of the myth do not explicitly
say; they merely report that Europa gave birth to a line of wise kings. But this
ellipsis makes it clear that after Jupiter arrives on the island with Europa he
impregnates her. Although Titian's painting does not literally depict this act,
it does strongly hint at the sexual nature of the events to follow. Consider, for
instance, Europa'sr evealed breast, the evocative and allusive folds of drapery
between her bare and fleshy thighs, the froth of sea foaming around both figures,
and so on. The paintingi mpliest hat sex will soon take place, and moreovert, hat
this sex will be of the nonconsensual and violent sort.4 The latter is indicated
by Europa'se xtremelyp recariousp osture;s he is clearlyn ot riding the bull but
rather being savagely dragged off against her will. The ominous storm clouds
in the direction in which the two are heading portend her unhappy fate, and
the monstrous fish directly below emphasizes the danger and threat. In these
ways, the picture is emphatic about the violent sexual aims for which Europa
is being forcibly hauled off.

But do these signs of nonconsensual sexual violence justify describing
the picture as one representing a rape? One might think that they do not,
since, strictly speaking, the painting depicts not Europa'ss exual violation but
simply her abduction.T he painting'st itle, Rattod 'Europas, upportst his reading
because, one might argue, the early modern ratto is better translated as
"abduction"o r "kidnapping"th an as "rape."6

There are several problems with this interpretation of Titian's picture. First,
as far as we know, the painting does not have what one might call a proper title.
Titian did not officially entitle any of his paintings-such was not common
practice in sixteenth-century Venice-and the title Ratto d'Europa was first
given to the painting fifty years after Titian's death.6 One cannot, then, at least
not without further argument, lean on the painting's title in making a case
about what it represents.

But let us pass over this difficulty. It is still the case that once the painting
was called Ratto d'Europa, this became its standard title. The endurance and
widespread acceptance of the title may be most readily explained by its suitedness
to the painting'sr epresentationalc ontent: the rattoo f Europai s just what
the painting depicts. Now if, as some suggest, ratto meant simply abduction-that
is, merely the forcible carrying off of a person without any connotations of sexual
violence-then this might count in favor of the view that Titian's painting
does not represent the rape of Europa. But, I contend, the seventeenth-century
termr attor arelym eant merelya bductioni n the neutrals ense describeda bove:i t
was used almoste xclusivelyfo r thea bductiono ffemales,a nd in these cases sexual
violence was almosta lwaysi mplied.7T hat is, when the "object"b eing carriedo ff
was a woman,r apirem eant not garden-varietyk idnappingb ut, rather,s pecified
abduction of a certain sort, namely one committed for the purposes of sexual
violation. So although the term did not commonly designate the act of forced sexual intercourse itself (there were, and still are, more legalistic terms for this, such as stuprare) i,t did refert o the abductiono f a woman for this purpose.

The case is similar with Titian's painting. In a strict sense it merely shows
us a scantily-dressed woman awkwardly posed on a bull who is in the water
far from shore. But this fastidiously minimal description fails to capture the
fact that the painting represents an action-that is, a temporally extended
and goal-directed activity. Now, actions take time to complete and the static
medium of painting, unlike film, cannot literally represent the entire process
from beginning to end. If a painter means to represent an action (as opposed
to, say, painting a portrait), she can either show the moment at which the goal
is achieved and ignore the steps leading up to it, or represent a stage of this
temporally extended activity and merely suggest the goal toward which it aims.
Titian's painting is an example of the latter. In order to properly understand
the scene we must situate it within the whole action of which it is but a stage.
Any interpretationo f the picturet hat insists upon overlookingt he goal toward
which the scene is a step would be incomplete.8 So although it is not false to
simply say of the painting, as the strict description allows, that the bull is in
water far from shore, such a description misses the important point that the
bull is moving in a direction, namely toward Crete. And the fact that the island
is not included in the picture should not stop us from saying that the picture
shows the bull swimming toward this goal. Likewise, the fact that forced sexual
intercourse is not depicted should not stop us from saying that Titian's picture
shows the bull in the process of achieving this objective. Indeed, as discussed
above, the picture provides many visual cues that sexual violation is imminent.
The painting does not, then, represent a mere kidnapping, but rather the forcible
carrying off of Europa for the purpose of sexual intercourse. This, I think,
justifies saying that the painting represents rape.

But the painting does not simply represent rape in a neutral manner. Rather,
it eroticizesE uropa'sr ape, and it does so along two axes: first, in terms of what
it depicts, and second, by calling for certain feelings regarding what it depicts.
Let me explain what I mean by these two things.

First,t he painting eroticizesE uropa'sr ape by representingh er as complicit
and taking pleasure in the act. For instance, Europa'sf acial expression does
not obviously betray distress, fear, or pain, and is often interpreted as a look of
ecstasy.9F urther,h er masturbatoryg raspo f the bull'sp hallic horn suggestsh er
active participation not only in riding the bull (she's got the bull by the horns,
so to speak), but also in the sexual act. And the joyous colors of twilight seem
to emanate from her and evoke her passion. Consider, in addition, the pink
drapery above her head that appears to flutter as the result of voluntary waving,
a standard sign of triumph. Finally, notice that the putto, or cherub, directly
above Europa has a bow but no arrows, suggesting that she has been "shot" and
so is already in the grip of erotic love. These indications of her complicity andsexual intercourse itself (there were, and still are, more legalistic terms for this,
such as stuprare)i,t did refert o the abductiono f a woman for this purpose.
The case is similar with Titian's painting. In a strict sense it merely shows
us a scantily-dressed woman awkwardly posed on a bull who is in the water
far from shore. But this fastidiously minimal description fails to capture the
fact that the painting represents an action-that is, a temporally extended
and goal-directed activity. Now, actions take time to complete and the static
medium of painting, unlike film, cannot literally represent the entire process
from beginning to end. If a painter means to represent an action (as opposed
to, say, painting a portrait), she can either show the moment at which the goal
is achieved and ignore the steps leading up to it, or represent a stage of this
temporally extended activity and merely suggest the goal toward which it aims.
Titian's painting is an example of the latter. In order to properly understand
the scene we must situate it within the whole action of which it is but a stage.
Any interpretationo f the picturet hat insists upon overlookingt he goal toward
which the scene is a step would be incomplete.8 So although it is not false to
simply say of the painting, as the strict description allows, that the bull is in
water far from shore, such a description misses the important point that the
bull is moving in a direction, namely toward Crete. And the fact that the island
is not included in the picture should not stop us from saying that the picture
shows the bull swimming toward this goal. Likewise, the fact that forced sexual
intercourse is not depicted should not stop us from saying that Titian's picture
shows the bull in the process of achieving this objective. Indeed, as discussed
above, the picture provides many visual cues that sexual violation is imminent.
The painting does not, then, represent a mere kidnapping, but rather the forcible
carrying off of Europa for the purpose of sexual intercourse. This, I think,
justifies saying that the painting represents rape.

But the painting does not simply represent rape in a neutral manner. Rather,
it eroticizesE uropa'sr ape, and it does so along two axes: first, in terms of what
it depicts, and second, by calling for certain feelings regarding what it depicts.
Let me explain what I mean by these two things.

First,t he painting eroticizesE uropa'sr ape by representingh er as complicit
and taking pleasure in the act. For instance, Europa'sf acial expression does
not obviously betray distress, fear, or pain, and is often interpreted as a look of
ecstasy.9F urther,h er masturbatoryg raspo f the bull'sp hallic horn suggestsh er
active participation not only in riding the bull (she's got the bull by the horns,
so to speak), but also in the sexual act. And the joyous colors of twilight seem
to emanate from her and evoke her passion. Consider, in addition, the pink
drapery above her head that appears to flutter as the result of voluntary waving,
a standard sign of triumph. Finally, notice that the putto, or cherub, directly
above Europa has a bow but no arrows, suggesting that she has been "shot" and
so is already in the grip of erotic love. These indications of her complicity and pleasure are so strong that it is not uncommon to describe the painting as this art historiand oes, noting "Europa'osw n excitementa s it begins to flowt hroughh errippling, pulsating flesh and ignite the landscape around her. As she approaches
her divine union, she starts to throb with ... [a] sense of rapture"( Nash 1985,
60). (It may be worth noting that these are not the words of an outmoded male
art historian but rather of a woman writing in the mid-1980s.)
To see this point more clearly, let us briefly contrast Titian's painting with
another picture that depicts a rape but does not, in this first sense of the term,
eroticize rape. Consider Nicolas Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.'0 In the foreground we see victims with pained
and terrifiede xpressionso n their faces who kick and raiset heir armsi n struggle
and vehement resistance. The overall scene is one of violence and mayhem,
babies and old mothers left crying in the dirt as the women are violently dragged
off. There is little hint that the impending forced sexual intercourse will be
pleasurableo r beneficialf or these women, nor a suggestiont hat they instigated
or willingly participatei n the act." Poussin'sp ainting representst hese women
as victims of unwanted and unbidden sexual assault.

Titian's painting, by contrast, indicates in a variety of ways that Europa is not
truly a victim but rather an active and willing participant for whom the rape is
pleasurable, as I've discussed. This is what I mean by saying that the painting
eroticizesr ape in terms of its depictive content. And yet, I began this paperb y
pointing to those aspects of the painting that imply the nonconsensual nature
of the impending sexual intercourse. So at this point it may strike you that I'm
talking out of both sides of my mouth. And in a certain sense, I am-or better,
the painting is talking out of both sides of its mouth, as it were. That is, Titian's
painting engages in something of a contradiction:b y eroticizingE uropa'sr ape
in the way I've just described, the painting simultaneously affirms and denies
rape. Now, although the concept of rape is not logically incompatible with
an attribution of sexual pleasure to the victim, these two thoughts do not sit
comfortablyt ogether.A nd it certainlyi s a contradictiont o suggestt hat a victim
activelye ngages in her own rape.'1T he incompatibilityh ere turns on consent.
Since rape is an act of sexual intercourse forced upon a person against her will,
portraying a victim as a willing participant in sexual intercourse nullifies one
defining feature of rape (that is, force), transmuting the act into something
akin to seduction.'3

In this way, Titian's painting trades on a common fantasy about female
sexuality and, in particular, a common fantasy of rape. The basic components
of this fantasy are likely familiar. They include the notion that women at least
sometimes solicit or otherwise "ask for" rape (perhaps by dressing provocatively
or staying out late unaccompanied by a man); that because they provoke and
tempt men in this way, women deserve whatever sexual advances are made to
them; that rape satisfies women's secret desires to be taken and ravished; that although they appear to be terrified, deep down they are actually enjoying themselves; that they pretend to resist in order to protect their virtue but their "no"r eally means "yes"a; nd so on.14N ow, in calling this a common fantasy of
female sexuality I do not mean to suggest that many people explicitly affirm
such propositions to themselves or others. Rather, I think that such assumptions
about female sexuality are often unconscious or otherwise inexplicit and
are rarely articulated clearly. But one doesn't have to look very hard to see
these assumptions manifest today in peoples' attitudes, in a variety of cultural
representations (for example, movies, pornography, popular music, and high
art), and in the way that rape is handled in official arenas.15T he evidence we
have suggestst hat this was equallyt rue in Titian'ss ocial milieu,16a nd a strong
case has been made that this fantasy pervades Italian Renaissance artistic
representationso f rape.17

As our examination of Titian's painting shows, this fantasy is at odds with
itself, fluctuating between the victim's resistance and consent, innocence and
guilt, unwanted terror and sexual pleasure. But these tensions cannot be too
glaring or the fantasy will collapse:a ffirmingE uropa'sv ictimizationt oo much
would cancel her complicity,o veremphasizingh er participationw ould negate
her helplessness, and laying too much weight on her terror would render her
pleasure implausible. Balancing these potentially incongruous elements would
be particularlyd ifficultw hen the fantasy is materializedi n visual form, which
tends to make things concrete and often leaves less to the imagination than, say,
literaryr epresentationsW. e might, then, considerm aintaining an equilibrium
between these seeminglyi ncompatiblec omponentsy et anothero f the painting's
achievements. I urge instead that Titian's intricate, vivid, and deeply sensual
conjuring of this rape fantasy counts as an ethical defect. To see why, let us turn
to the second way in which the painting eroticizes rape. But before we do, I
should briefly say something about ethical defects in works of art.

There are many reasons an artwork might be judged unethical. One arises
from concern about an artwork's subject matter, either because it represents
something that shouldn't be displayed publicly (such as nudity) or because
it depicts unethical actions, scenarios, lifestyles, and so on. Jesse Helms, for
instance, regularly espouses the idea that acts and lifestyles that he deems
immoral simply shouldn't be represented, and that any work depicting such
things is thereby" immoralt rash"( Bolton 1992, 75).18A nother reasonh as nothing
to do with an artwork'sr epresentationacl ontent, but ratherr estse ntirelyo n
the unethical character of the person who produced the work. For example, a
recently discovered group of watercolor landscapes bearing the signature "Adolf
Hitler" has been deemed so morally reprehensible that it has been hidden in
a secret location protectedb y the U. S. Army.19A relatedb ut differentr eason
pertains to the unjust conditions under which a work was produced. The great
pyramids in Egypt, for example, might be judged unethical because they were built through slave labor. A final reason rests upon a causal claim about and artwork'sh armfulc onsequences.W illiam Golding'sL ordo f the Flies (1962) for instance, might be deemed unethical because it apparently incited a group of college students to viciously torture a sow and her piglets and eventually set them ablaze (see Booth 1988, 163).

How many of these one accepts as genuine ethical defects depends upon the
ethical theory to which one subscribes. I bring them up only to highlight the
peculiar features of the essentially different kind of ethical defect in Titian's
painting. This defect depends not on the painting's genetic history, nor upon
empiricalc laims about its effects in the world,20n or on the fact that it merely
depicts an unethical act. Rather, the ethical defect at issue for us lies in the
work'se thically defective vision of rape.21T his vision consists primarilyi n the
picture's eroticization of rape, which leads us to the second sense in which I
mean the term.

When I say that Titian's painting eroticizes rape, I mean not only that it
depicts a willing victim for whom this rape is pleasurableb, ut also that it represents
this internally conflicted event in a manner aimed to arouse the viewer's
sexual desire. This is not to say that the audience does in fact respond to this
picture with erotic feelings, but rather that the painting calls upon us to have
such feelings about this event. This teleological understanding of artworks,
which has its roots in Aristotle's Rhetoric( 1984) and Poetics( 1987),22h as the
distinct advantageo f allowingf or a robustu nderstandingo f aestheticf ailure:a n
artwork is flawed insofar as it fails to engender the response for which it calls.
"Erotica,"fo r instance, designatesa categoryo f artisticw orkst hat aim to sexually
stimulate the audience, and insofar as a piece of erotica fails in this aim it is
defective. But this view needs refining because, as discussed below, there might
be causesf ort he audience'sf ailuret o responda s an artworka sksa t have nothing
to do with the work itself and everything to do with external circumstances.
Although such causes might explain our failuret o responda ppropriatelyt,h ey
do not justify negative judgments about the works. Berys Gaut (1998) provides
a formulation that takes this into consideration: to the extent that an artwork
does not merit the response for which it calls, it is defective on that count. (As
we shall see in the last section of this paper, the problem with this formulation
is that it does not appear to distinguish the artistically relevant responses for
which a work calls from the irrelevant ones.)

In making his case, Gaut uses the language of prescription to capture what
I'mc alling the teleologicald imensiono f representationaal rtworks;h e sayst hat
a work prescribesa particularr esponse to the world it represents.T his is not
a surreptitiouss muggling-ino f authoriali ntention-what the workp rescribes
need not be what the actual author intended (although a work's prescriptions
are attributablet o the implied author).23R ather, the languageo f prescription
refers to the various rhetorical devices through which works aim to shape the audience's sentiments regarding the characters and events they depict. This is
a useful, indeed some would arguee ssential (see Booth 1961),2w4 ay of thinking
about literary works of art, but the terminology is infelicitous when it comes to
picturesb ecause, unlike prescriptions,t heir calls for affective responsesa re not
propositional. Pictures lack, for instance, narrators to instruct us, either explicitly
or implicitly, in our responses to characters and events. So how does one
accurately discern the affective responses that a picture calls for? How can we
tell how we are supposedto feel about characters,e vents, and other things represented
in a picture? How does one discern a picture's aims in that regard?

Rather than attempt a theoretical explanation of this complicated process,25
I shall briefly demonstrate how visual evidence supports my claim that Titian's
painting calls for an erotic response to Europa'sr ape. Consider, for instance,
the panoply of sensual textures (wet cloth, soft flesh, frothy sea foam) or, more
important,t he visual emphasisu pon eroticallyc hargedp arts of Europa'sb ody,
such as her bare thighs, her navel revealed by clinging drapery, the triangular
shape of the drapery between her thighs that highlights her pubes, and the
vulvar form insinuated by these pliant folds. Further, observe the way that this
entire pubic region falls on axis with her breast and navel along the strongest
diagonal in the painting. And notice that Europa'sp ose is obviouslyr iggeds o
that her legs spread toward the viewer; this posture is not justified narratively
(that is, by something in the story) but rather clearly aims to allow the audience
unobstructed visual access to this key erogenous zone. But if there remains
any question about where we are supposed to look, two putti, or cherubs, (the
one directly above Europa and the other in the lower left corner of the painting)
stare directly at her crotch, thereby directing our attention to it. Finally,
although Europa'sfa ce is barelyv isible and her expressionh ardlyl egible,26h er
exposed breast, navel, and crotch are of central focus. In this way, sexualized
parts of her body are put on display as if not connected to a person with thoughts
or feelings. This invites the viewer to ignore her subjectivity while enjoying her
sexy body, an objectification that in its extreme form characterizes the act of
rape itself. In these ways, the painting palpably and insistently aims to kindle
the viewer'sc arnal appetites in regardt o Europa'sr ape.

I'veb een urgingt hat Titian'sp aintinge roticizesr apei n two ways:f irst,i t does
so in terms of its representational content, by portraying Europa as a willing
victim who derives pleasure from and actively solicits sexual abuse; and second,
it presents Europa's sexual subordination in a way aimed to sexually arouse
the viewer. The painting calls upon the viewer to respond to its problematic
portrayal of rape with erotic feelings, and this is its ethical defect.
But what, one might ask, what is the problem with responding to rape with
erotic feelings? Or, to put it another way, what is wrong with the response for
which Titian's painting calls? Since the answer to this question is not obvious,
here is a schematic account of an argument.27

1) In many societies women, just because they are women, are denied equality
of opportunity in many arenas and often suffer abuse, harassment, and
discrimination of various sorts.
2) This is a grave injustice.
3) The subordination of women is not inevitable but rather is sustained and
reproducedb y a complexo f social factorst hat can be explicit (as in the denial
of rights and privileges,o r in discriminatoryp ractices)o r more subtle (as in
the influence of religion, television, advertising, etc.).
4) Rape and the constant threat of rape play a significant role in women's subordination.
T hat is, rape is a mechanismo f genderi nequalitya nd not merely
a symptom of it.28
5) Eroticizing rape is a part of what sustains and promotes this inequality. Its
efficacy stems from the fact that tying gender inequality to sexual pleasure-a
pleasure in which almost all humans are deeply invested-renders that
inequality not just tolerable and easier to accept but attractive, pleasurable,
and even desirable.29

It follows that Titian's painting is ethically defective insofar as it calls upon viewers
to adopts entimentst owardr apet hat playa role in the reproductiono f gender
inequality. Note that this ethical defect does not depend upon claims about
whether the painting does in fact engender sexist attitudes in its audience.30
Such an empirical fact would be irrelevant to the defect at issue here, namely
that the painting aims to produce strongly positive feelings toward a despicable
act that currently plays an important role in perpetuating social injustice. It is
wrong on ethical grounds for us to enter into these sentiments, and yet refraining
from responding in this way would cause us to miss a significant aesthetic
dimension of the work.

What role, then, should this ethical defect play in our appreciation and
assessment of the painting's artistic value? I began by noting that Titian's painting
is widely celebrated as one of the hallmarks of Western art. I want now to
consider whether it deserves such univocal praise in light of the ethical concern
just raised. Does the painting's ethical defect legitimately diminish this widely
esteemed aesthetic value? Does the fact that the painting eroticizes rape give
us reason to reconsider its venerated place in the canon of Western art? I think
that it does. I shall now provide an argument for this with a little help from
David Hume and Aristotle.

II. SEPARATISM, MORALISM, AND ETHICISM

So far I have argued that while Titian's Rape of Europa is generally agreed to
merit the highest aesthetic praise, it is ethically defective in the sense that it
calls for an objectionable response to rape. This puts the viewer in something of a predicament in that these two dimensions-the aesthetically meritorious
and the ethically problematic-do not sit comfortably together. As feminists
we are pulled in the direction of condemning the work;a s appreciatorso f fine
art we are pulled in the direction of praising it. So what should we do when
estimating the overall value of the work as a whole? Must we choose between
our feminist qualms about the painting and our admiration of its artistic merits,
or is there some way to balance the two? Do the ethical blemishes and the
aesthetic merits interact?

One common resolutiont o this problems egregatest hese seeminglyo pposing
judgments and sympathies into airtight compartments. Let us call this strategy
"separatism."T he separatisth olds that although we find works like Rape of
Europa to be simultaneously agreeable and disagreeable, and so judge them
to be both meritorious and defective, the opposition is only apparent because
these sympathies and judgments actually pertain to utterly distinct kinds of
value. Works like these are good in one respect, namely aesthetic, but bad in a
completely different respect, namely ethical, and these two kinds of value are
incommensurable. The separatist's denial of any common measure between
ethical defects and aesthetic merits dissolves the apparent tension by refusing to
acknowledge any opposition in the first place. The separatist holds that there is
no basis for comparison between the two kinds of value: works such as Titian's
are simply good in one way and bad in another, end of story.

Separatism encounters difficulties in distinguishing the praiseworthy features
of such works from the blameworthy. The problem is that this often
boils down to a form/content distinction in which the aesthetic features are
associated with color, composition, line, and the like, and the ethical features
are associatedw ith the work'sr epresentationacl ontent. (Aesthetic formalism,
the most common form of separatism,a doptst his strategy.)A nd in such cases,
the separatist'sr igid partition of the aesthetic from the ethical depends upon
a crisp distinction between form and content, a distinction that is notoriously
difficult to achieve.

But let us imagine that the separatist can handle this problem. It would
still prove an unsatisfactory way of dealing with works such as the Rape of
Europa because it fails to capture the phenomenology of our encounter with
them. Separatism misses something real and troubling in our experience with
such works-that unqualifiedly savoring them and recognizing their artistic
worth appears to implicitly condone their ethically problematic vision. The
praiseworthy and blameworthy aspects of these works seem to overlap and
interpenetrate so that the works do not strike us as simply good in one way
and bad in an entirely different and unrelated way, but rather present us with
a genuine conflict in which our sympathies are pulled in opposing directions
along the same axis. Separatism cannot explain this conflict.

There is another way to handle the predicament in which Titian's painting puts us that appears to acknowledge a common measure between the two kinds
of value. This approach,o ften called "moralism,"h olds that aesthetic value is
simplya mattero f whether a workp romotest he ethically good.31T he moralist
holds that a work of art is good as a work of art insofar as it is ethical, and no features
other than those pertaining to its ethical value are relevant to appreciating
the work aesthetically. As we have seen in the recent reemergence of this view
in the Robert Mapplethorpe and Brooklyn Museum controversies (see Bolton
1992 and Rothfield 2001), this reduction of aesthetic value to ethical value is
unsatisfactoryb ecause it effectivelye liminates the aesthetic altogether.
Is there a model for the relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic
value of a work that doesn't subsume aesthetic value under the ethical? Can
we account for the dilemma that works such as Titian's pose without either
rigidly segregating the ethical from the aesthetic or reducing the latter to the
former?

The philosophy of art has recently witnessed a renewed interest in the
intersection of ethics and aesthetics. This interest takes several forms, one of
which is often called ethicism (See, for example, Booth 1988 and 1998, Carroll
1996 and 1998, Devereaux 1998, Dickie 1989, M. Eaton 1997 and 2001, Gaut
1998,H anson 1998,a nd Kieran1 996).32E thicismh olds that the ethical features
of an artwork are relevant to, but not determinative of, its aesthetic merit. To
explain how a work's ethical value can legitimately bear on its aesthetic value,
the ethicist typically relies upon what I shall call an assimilationm odel.3T3 he
assimilation model explains the relevance of an artwork's ethical properties
to aesthetic judgment by construing these ethical properties as one species
of a larger, multifarious category of aesthetic value. "There are a plurality of
aesthetic values," writes Berys Gaut, "of which the ethical values of artworks
are but a single kind" (1998, 183). According to this strategy, ethical properties
of worksc an both diminisha nd augmentt heir aesthetic value.34I shall refer
to this featureo f the assimilationm odel as its symmetryS. o, artworksc an not
only depreciate aesthetically by virtue of their ethical defects but can also be
aesthetically enhanced by virtue of their ethical strengths. (An asymmetrical
version of ethicism, by contrast, would hold that ethical values can diminish
but not augment, or augment but not diminish, a work's aesthetic value.)
There are at least two problems with the assimilation model. First, the identification
of ethical values as a kind of aesthetic value erases the distinction
between the two kinds of value. One need not be a separatist invested in a rigid
distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic to find this unsatisfactory,
for the very aim of ethicism is to explain why one sort of value bears on judgments
regardingv alue of a differents ort. Identifying one of these as a species
of the other sidesteps the problem by denying any real difference between the
two, thereby rendering ethicism (that is, the view that ethical value bears upon
aesthetic value) tautologous.

Second, the symmetry resulting from the assimilation of ethical values to a
broader category of aesthetic ones is counterintuitive. Whereas the idea that
an artwork'se thical faultsm ight detractf rom its overall artisticv alue has some
intuitive appeal, the notion that a work might be better as a work of art in virtue
of its ethical merits does not. The presence of an ethically commendable trait
will not lend an artworkg race,s ubtlety,h armoniousnesso, r any other aesthetic
value one might choose, nor will it improvea worka long these axes. It is no surprise,
t hen, that all of the exampleso fferedb y ethicism'ss upportersin volvec ases
in which a highly acclaimed work of art is found unethical and on this basis
argued to be aesthetically diminished. But no one, to my knowledge, explicitly
endorses the notion that works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's
Cabin (1982) are better artisticallyp reciselyd ue to their ethical merits.S uch a
view seems not only too moralizing but also sometimes false: overly righteous
worksc an be sentimental, self-congratulatorya, nd boring (all aestheticf laws).
Justt hink, for example,o f Steven Spielberg'sS chindler'Ls ist (1994). But the fact
that works are not artistically improved by their ethical merits does not falsify
ethicism, for they may be aesthetically marred in virtue of their ethical failings.
How does the lattern ot entail the former?I suggestt hat Hume offersa solution
in his essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (1985).35

III. HUMEAN ETHICISM

Although Hume was not the first to defend the congruence of ethics and
aesthetics, his essay is arguably the first to treat this junction nonreductively.
Unlike some of his predecessorsH, ume does not reduce an artwork'sa esthetic
value to its morality, but rather suggests that a work's aesthetic merit can be
influenced by its ethical character. More specifically, Hume holds that the
ethically problematic character of an artwork need not completely destroy its
aesthetic value, but it can diminisha worka esthetically.

Here's what Hume says about this. At the end of the essay, he makes the
following remark about artworks that we (the audience) find ethically problematic:
"[W]here vicious manners are described without being marked with
the proper characters of blame and disapprobation, this must be allowed to
disfigure[ the work],a nd to be a real deformityI. cannot, nor is it propert hat
I should, enter into such sentiments; and however I may excuse the poet, on
account of the manners of his age, I never can relish the composition. The
want of humanity and of decency, so conspicuous in the characters drawn by
several of the ancient poets ... diminishecs onsiderablyth e merito f their noble
performances .. ." (1985, 246; italics added). Several features of this claim are
worth noting. First, Hume says that when an artwork contravenes the audience's
morals tandards,t hey should considert his a "deformity.S"i nce deformityi s for
Hume the contrary of beauty (1978, Book II, Part I, Section VIII: "Of Beauty and Deformity," 293-303), this means that the ethical defect disfigures the
work aesthetically. Second, the influence of the ethical upon the aesthetic
admits of degrees. Hume says not that "want of humanity and decency" ruins
the work completely,b ut rather that this diminishest he work'sa rtistic merit.
This subtlety, which is so conspicuously absent from moralism, respects the
all-things-consideredn ature of judgmentsa bout the artistic value of worksa s
a whole. Third, neither here nor elsewhere in the essay does Hume affirm the
converse, that a work's moral virtues can improve its composition and thereby
augment its aesthetic merit. This is perhaps an accident that does not reflect
any intended asymmetry,b ut I suggestt hat, regardlesso f what Hume actually
thought, it would be advantageous to construe the influence of ethical value
upon aesthetic value asymmetrically; that is, to hold that in some cases an
artwork's ethical flaws diminish it aesthetically without thereby committing
to the claim that a work can be enhanced as a work of art simply because it
promotes a proper ethical perspective. It makes sense to hold that whereas an
artwork's ethical failings can impede its aesthetic success, its ethical virtues
provide no guarantee of such success.

So, the subtlety and the asymmetry are real advantages of Hume's version
of ethicism. But what is the argument for it? Unfortunately he does not provide
one, so part of my aim here will be to construct such an argument. The point
is not Hume exegesis, but rather to see what can be said in favor of a view that
offers these advantages for dealing with works such as Titian's.
I begin with Hume's famous analogy between artworks and friends: "We
choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour
and disposition"( 1985, 244).36A t firstb lush this statement appearst oo strong.
The best friends are typically not those whose views and tastes are identical
to our own, but rather those whose humor and disposition diverge from ours,
those who will help us to see and appreciate things that we otherwise would
miss. Good friends expand our horizons and thereby enrich our lives. Likewise
with works of art: the best works of art call upon us to adopt unfamiliar points
of view and imagine strange worlds, often thereby revealing something new
about our own world, something that we otherwise would have overlooked. It
might seem, then, that although Hume's analogy between artworks and friends
reveals an important similarity between the two, he is far too conservative in
what he requires from both.

And yet, the context in which Hume's comment arises suggests that he
means not conformity in overall disposition but rather conformity in something
like ethical orientation. We might then read the passage thus: "We choose our
favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of ethos." Now, you
still might not agree that we choose someone as a friend because they share our
ethical orientation, but it seems plausible that a certain amount of agreement
in this regard is required in order to appreciate someone's other qualities and so to consider her as a candidate for friendship in the first place. A person's ethical values cannot diverge wildly from mine if I am to appreciate her sense of humor, taste, etc. For instance, if someone is an outspoken racist but is in
other respects likeable (perhaps she has a sharp sense of humor and is in some
ways generous and kind), my aversion to the morally repugnant feature of her
personality will distract me from whatever redeeming qualities she might possess.
Perhaps the more conservative a person is, the more similarity to her own
values she requires from potential friends, but most everyone has some point
at which another's ethical orientation would be so disagreeable as to diminish
or even block enjoyment of that person's other potentially redeeming (in the
sense of friend-making) qualities.

Likewise, an artwork's ethical failings might impede the viewer's aesthetic
response, preventing it from even getting off the ground. Hume does not explain
exactly how this works, but it's not difficult to come up with a story in which a
work's ethical blemishes inspire such a feeling of aversion in the audience that
it inhibits their aesthetic delight in the work. This could happen in one of
several ways. A work's ethical deformity might result in an unpleasant feeling
so strong that it distracts the viewer from those features that would otherwise
arouse pleasure. Imagine, for example, stubbing your toe and the resultant pain
being so sharp and annoying as to make it very difficult to concentrate on anything
else, much less something as subtle and demanding as an artwork. Or the
impediment might work this way: the resultant feeling of repugnance so disturbs
the audience's state of mind that it inhibits their capacity for that free and
spontaneous activity that many think characterizesa esthetic pleasure.I n this
case, even though the audience could concentrate on the work, they would be
unable to take pleasure in it. Imagine that even if you could attend to an artwork
after stubbing your toe, the accident had altered your disposition, making you
too peevish and ill-temperedt o feel pleasurei n what you saw or heard.37E ither
by distraction or disturbance, then, an ethical flaw in an artwork could make
it difficult or even impossible to take pleasure in its artistically praiseworthy
features, much as an ethical defect in a potential friend could inhibit appreciation
of the person's merits. The point of the friendship analogy seems to be that
just as we must concur with a person's ethical orientation in order to be suitably
positionedt o enjoyh er other qualities,s o we must agreew ith an artwork'se thos
in order to take pleasure in its various artistic merits. When this condition of
conformity in ethical orientation is not met-that is, when a work strikes us
as ethically flawed-the ethical failing interferes with our appreciation of the
work'so ther praiseworthyfe atures.I shall call this construalo f the relationship
between ethical defects and artistic merits the interferencme odel.
Does interference provide a good model for explaining how an artwork's
ethical flaws can legitimately diminish its artistic value? I think not. To see
why, consider the following objection. The interference model conceives of an so to consider her as a candidate for friendship in the first place. A person's
ethical values cannot diverge wildly from mine if I am to appreciate her sense
of humor, taste, etc. For instance, if someone is an outspoken racist but is in
other respects likeable (perhaps she has a sharp sense of humor and is in some
ways generous and kind), my aversion to the morally repugnant feature of her
personality will distract me from whatever redeeming qualities she might possess.
Perhaps the more conservative a person is, the more similarity to her own
values she requires from potential friends, but most everyone has some point
at which another's ethical orientation would be so disagreeable as to diminish
or even block enjoyment of that person's other potentially redeeming (in the
sense of friend-making) qualities.

Likewise, an artwork's ethical failings might impede the viewer's aesthetic
response, preventing it from even getting off the ground. Hume does not explain
exactly how this works, but it's not difficult to come up with a story in which a
work's ethical blemishes inspire such a feeling of aversion in the audience that
it inhibits their aesthetic delight in the work. This could happen in one of
several ways. A work's ethical deformity might result in an unpleasant feeling
so strong that it distracts the viewer from those features that would otherwise
arouse pleasure. Imagine, for example, stubbing your toe and the resultant pain
being so sharp and annoying as to make it very difficult to concentrate on anything
else, much less something as subtle and demanding as an artwork. Or the
impediment might work this way: the resultant feeling of repugnance so disturbs
the audience's state of mind that it inhibits their capacity for that free and
spontaneous activity that many think characterizesa esthetic pleasure.I n this
case, even though the audience could concentrate on the work, they would be
unable to take pleasure in it. Imagine that even if you could attend to an artwork
after stubbing your toe, the accident had altered your disposition, making you
too peevish and ill-temperedt o feel pleasurei n what you saw or heard.37E ither
by distraction or disturbance, then, an ethical flaw in an artwork could make
it difficult or even impossible to take pleasure in its artistically praiseworthy
features, much as an ethical defect in a potential friend could inhibit appreciation
of the person's merits. The point of the friendship analogy seems to be that
just as we must concur with a person's ethical orientation in order to be suitably
positionedt o enjoyh er other qualities,s o we must agreew ith an artwork'se thos
in order to take pleasure in its various artistic merits. When this condition of
conformity in ethical orientation is not met-that is, when a work strikes us
as ethically flawed-the ethical failing interferes with our appreciation of the
work'so ther praiseworthyfe atures.I shall call this construalo f the relationship
between ethical defects and artistic merits the interferencme odel.

Does interference provide a good model for explaining how an artwork's
ethical flaws can legitimately diminish its artistic value? I think not. To see
why, consider the following objection. The interference model conceives of an artwork'se thical defect as a mere impedimentt o the audience'sa ppreciationo for the work's artistically valuable features. But many things could impede attention to or enjoyment of an artwork without affecting the work aesthetically.

As suggested in the analogy above, stubbing one's toe might make it difficult or
even impossible to attend to or take pleasure in an artwork, but the stubbed toe
itself does not count against the artistic value of the work. It would be absurd
to deem a work artistically deficient simply because the pain in my toe made it
impossiblef orm e to attend to or enjoyt he artworkf, or althought he stubbedt oe
provides a genetic (that is, causal) explanation for my failure to have an aesthetic
response,i t does not providea justificationfo r my failuret o so respond.H owever
it may interfere with aesthetic pleasure, my stubbed toe is clearly aesthetically
irrelevant, and likewise with an artwork's ethical flaws. Ethical defects may
similarly interfere with one's appreciation of an artwork but we're not thereby
justified in blaming the work for our lack of aesthetic response.38
A supporter of the interference model might respond that this objection
misunderstandst he nature of the ethical defect with which the ethicist is concerned.
As I mentioned earlier, a work of art might be considered unethical for
a variety of reasons, many of which are foreign to the work itself (for example,
genetic history, character of the artist, or causal effects). But the ethical flaw
that concerns the interference model is a feature of the work itself. As we saw
with Titian's Rape of Europa, the eroticization of rape is built into the visual
nuts-and-bolts of the work itself. It is this feature of the work itself that calls for
a feeling of aversion so distracting or disturbing, according to the interference
model, that it would impede appreciation of other aspects of the painting, for
instance, its sensual textures and luminous colors. This impediment differs from
the stubbed toe in that it is not an external hindrance to our enjoyment of the
work, but rather a feature of the work itself that interferes with our access to
its other qualities.

But this move cannot save the interference model. To see why, imagine a
painting that emits a foul and noxious odor. This would be a case in which
some real feature of the painting produces a feeling of aversion that might well
make it difficulto r even impossiblet o appreciatet he painting.N evertheless,w e
shouldn't say in such a case that the impediment (that is, the stench) is relevant
to the painting's artistic value. If someone judged a painting inferior and justified
this by pointing to its putrid odor, we should say that the criterion operative in
this judgment is misplaced: barring a few exceptional cases, a painting's smell
makes no difference to its artistic value. And so although it may be true that
a work's smell interferes with our access to those features that make the work
good artistically, it does not follow that the smell itself is artistically relevant,
that it should play a role in justifying judgments about the work's aesthetic
value. On the contrary, the putrid odor does nothing to erode the artistically
praiseworthyf eatures;t hese would remain untouchedb y the artwork'sn oxious smell. Likewise, so the objection might go, with ethical features of works of art.

Although a work'se thical blemishesc ould interferew ith our accesst o its artistic
merits, it would be misguided to say that such a work thereby suffers qua work
of art. Like a bad smell, an ethical flaw in an artwork is potentially damaging to
our experience of the work but nevertheless aesthetically irrelevant.
We can see from this objection that it is not enough to demonstrate that
a work's ethical defects interfere with aesthetic appreciation. To answer this,
the Humean needs to establish a more intimate connection between a work's
artistic merits and the ethical defect in question. Noel Carroll (1996) suggests
that at this point we look to Aristotle for support. In the Poetics (1996), Aristotle
describeso ne function of tragedya s the arousalo f the audience'sp ity and terror
for the protagonist.T his is a means to achieving tragedy'sp rimarya im, namely
the catharsiso f these emotions.39A tragedyt hat achievest his end-that is, that
producesf ear for the protagonist'sp light and pity for his misfortunes-counts
as a good tragedy, whereas one that fails to produce this response counts as a
bad one. For Aristotle, then, engendering a particular feeling (in this case pity
and fear) serves as a criterion of artistic excellence. This seems like a reasonable
way to see things: a good comedy is one that succeeds in making us laugh, a
good piece of erotica in sexually exciting us, a good melodrama in making us
weep, and so on.

In showing how a good tragedy achieves this end, Aristotle explains that
the protagonist must be of the right moral character (1996, 16 [52b28-53a17]).
"Right" here does not mean morally flawless, for if the protagonist were perfect
in this regardh, is passagef romg ood fortunet o misfortunew oulda ngeru s rather
than evoke our pity. Likewise, the protagonist cannot be wicked, for if he were
his fall from prosperity to misfortune might be morally satisfying but neither
pitiablen or terrifying.T he "right"m oralc haracterf or the protagonist,A ristotle
explains, falls between the poles of virtuosity and wickedness; he should be
within the realm of human frailty and so easier for the audience to identify with.
Such a protagonist would be good enough to merit the audience's pity when he
falls into adversity but not so good that his downfall will provoke outrage.
These observations help to explain how the achievement of a work's artistic
aims can depend upon the audience's agreement with the work's ethical orientation
or vision, and so how disagreement with this orientation can hinder an
aesthetically significant response. Psychological identification with a character
involves, among other things, adoptingh er point of view.39I f the characterh as
a severee thical flaw (the questiono f the degreeo f ethical failing is one to which
we shall return shortly), then putting ourselves in her shoes means taking up an
ethically defective perspective, and this is something that an ethically sensitive
person has good reason not to do. But if in such a case we fail to identify with
the character,t hen we will not respond appropriatelyw hen, for instance, his
fortune erodes into misfortune; rather than fear his impending downfall and pity his suffering and grief, we might applaud them. Since invoking pity and terror is a significant artistic aim of tragedy, this means that our ethical qualms about the protagonist should prevent us from responding in a way required for
the work to succeed artistically.

Hume appears to agree with Aristotle's idea that characters' ethical flaws
can hinder the identification required for proper engagement with a story. In
speaking of the "want of humanity and of decency [of] the characters drawn
by ancient poets," mentioned above, Hume observes that "we are not interested
in the fortunes and sentiments of such rough heroes ... we cannot prevail on
ourselves to enter into [the author's] sentiments, or bear an affection to characters,
which we plainly discover to be blameable" (1985, 246). If a story aims
to engage our interest in its heroes and this interest is essential to the story's
success, but the heroes do not merit our sympathy precisely because they are
ethically objectionable( or in Hume'st erms, "rough")t, hen the ethical defect
can hinder the artistically relevant response and so count against the artistic
value of the story. This view of the relationship between ethical defects and
artistic value frames things in terms of conditions rather than in terms of mere
interference. A work's artistic success can depend upon the audience's agreement
with its ethical orientation, and failure to meet this condition can impede
the response required for the work's artistic success.
This, I suggest, is the right way to draw an analogy between artworks and
friends. Recall that on my reading, we must agree with a person's ethos in
order to appreciate some of the qualities that would make her a friend. That
is, agreement in ethos is a condition of enjoyment of other potential friendmaking
qualities. Now consider the following case. A keen sense of adventure
is one quality that might make a person a good friend. This aspect of a person's
personality would be analogous to an artistically valuable feature of a work; just
as this feature of the work is part of what makes the work good qua work of art,
so the keen sense of adventure is part of what might make the person valuable
as a friend.B ut now imaginet hat the person'sk een sense of adventurem anifests
itself only in the following manner: this person likes to go to gay bars and invite
young men to come home with him, but upon leaving the bar he assaults the
young men and leaves them wounded in a nearby alley. (Although repugnant,
this is surely a kind of adventure in that it involves violence, danger, and risk.) If
we find this kind of activity ethically reprehensiblet, hen it wouldb e difficulto r
even impossible to appreciate the keen sense of adventure that would otherwise
have made the person a good candidate for friendship. In this case the friendmaking
quality depends upon a response-approval of gay bashing-that we
have good reason not to adopt on ethical grounds. Or to put this another way,
refusal to comply with the person's ethical orientation renders inaccessible the
friend-making quality that depends upon it.

The case is analogous, Hume suggests, with some works of art. It can happen that appropriate engagement with an artwork requires adopting an ethically defective attitude or perspective. This is an ethical flaw in the work and renders inaccessible those features that depend upon it. In the case where those features
are artisticallys ignificant,t hen the work'sc all fora n ethicallyd efectiver esponse
will impede the work's artistic success in that regard.

But we should remember that for Hume this influence of the ethical flaw
upon a work'so verall artistic merit admits of degreesT. his acknowledgest hat
works can have a variety of merits and defects that we must balance and weigh
against one another when judging the work as a whole. In some works an
ethical flaw of the sort at issue here might be peripheral to the work's overall
aims and thus outweighed by meritorious features that remain untouched by
the defect. Consider the example of Titian's Bacanal in the Museo del Prado,
Madrid. There is an argument to be made that such a representation of a passive,
anonymous,v ulnerablen ude so gratuitouslys playedf or the viewer'se rotic
enjoyment is ethically problematic, at least in the context of a society pervaded
by gender inequality (see A. Eaton 2002). I do not have time to make that
argument now but ask that we grant it for the sake of the point at issue here,
namely that little in the Bacanal hangs on this defect. The objectified, passive
nude appears appended to the picture as an afterthought and is completely
unintegrated into the work; indeed, the nude could be easily ignored when
appreciating and judging the artistic value of the painting as a whole. This is
not the case with the Rape of Europa where the unethical feature-the call
for an erotic response to rape-plays a much more central role in the artistic
nuts-and-bolts of the picture.

In addition to responsiveness to the varying extent to which an ethical
defect can affect a work's overall artistic value, this analogy offers several other
benefits. First, it is responsive to degrees of severity in ethical defect. To see
this, imagine that our potential friend's sense of adventure manifested itself in
shopliftingr athert han gay bashing.40S hoplifting is a much less seriouso ffense,
ethically speaking, than gay bashing, and although I disapprove of shoplifting
in most cases, I don't think it a reprehensible crime and acknowledge cases
in which it is excusable. A shoplifter's values are not radically at odds with
my own, and so I may find it acceptable to turn a blind eye to such a person's
ethical flaw in order to appreciate other things about them that I may find
valuable, for instance their keen sense of adventure. But rape is a universally
reprehensible crime and I cannot comply with a work that asks me to think
and feel otherwise.

At this point one might ask whether I mean that I cannot enter into the
work's sentiments or simply that I should not. Returning to the friendship analogy
for a moment, if I am a homophobic gay basher myself, then I will be able
to appreciate the potential friend's sense of adventure. Likewise with Titian's
painting, if one is the sort of person who is erotically titillated by the sexual subordination of women, then one can have the erotic response that I have argued is central to the painting aesthetically. But according to my argument, this is to say that in such a case there is no aesthetic defect and so my account
for the influence of the ethical upon the aesthetic fails. Let's call this the Objection
from Creepiness.41

The Objection from Creepiness asks us to imagine an artwork whose aesthetic
value is only available to ethically flawed people or, as I shall call them
for brevity's sake, creeps. Taking into consideration the point about degrees
of ethical defect made earlier, let us imagine that these people are not minor
creeps of the shoplifting sort, but rather major creeps of the extreme racist
sort. And now imagine a painting about which one says, "It's a quite beautiful
picture but it appeals only to a very limited audience, for you've got to be a
membero f the KKKt o appreciatei ts beauty."N ote that to say that one cannot
appreciate the work unless one is a Klansman or is sympathetic to Klansmen
(that is, unless one is the sort of person that one should not be) is tantamount
to saying that one should not appreciate the work. And the fact that I must
enter into the sentiments of a Klansman in order to appreciate the beauty of
such a work appears to be an artistic, not simply a moral, defect. The problem
is not just the work's limited appeal to a highly specific audience. The artistic
value of James Joyce's Ulysses, for instance, is only fully accessible to those who
can read Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, and who are well versed in Homer,
Dante, and Shakespeare, to name only a few, but the novel is not thereby
aesthetically defective. This is perhaps because doing whatever it takes to get
inside the novel would be good for us; it would help us realize our potential
as human beings. What's special about the creepy case is that we have to do
something that's bad for us in order to get inside the work; we would have to
become creeps, even for just the moments that we spend with the work, and
this is contrary to our flourishing.42

The second thing to notice about this account is that one cannot stipulate
in advance of careful engagement with an artwork which responses matter
to its artistic aims. Only through scrupulous attention to the specificities of a
particular work can one see which responses called for are central, and which
peripheralt, o its artistics uccess.4I3n those cases in which it has been established
that a work's artistic success indeed depends upon ethically defective responses
from the audience, this will present an obstacle to that success. Such a work
contains the seeds of its own artistic failure.

Titian's painting, I suggest, is just such a case. Consider, for instance, that
the painting depends upon our sympathy for its "rough hero," the god in taurine
disguise who looks out at the viewer, a standard artistic device for psychological
identification.I t is his attitude towardE uropa'sr ape that we are supposedt o
adopt: that is, the work calls upon viewers to be sexually aroused by Europa's
helplessness, fear, and vulnerability; to find her both terrified and sexually excited, willing and resisting, and so on. I've shown that the call for this erotic response is a significant artistic dimension of the picture: the work's artistic success depends in part upon achieving this aim, that is, upon engendering this
erotic response in the audience. But I've also urged that this erotic response is
one that we have good reason not to have precisely because it takes rape as its
object. Putting these two thoughts together yields the conclusion that we have
good reason not to respond in a way required for the painting's artistic success;
that is, we have good reason not to respond to the painting in the way required
to fully understand and appreciate it. The work fails to warrant a response central
to achieving its own artistic aims and this counts an artistic failure.
This is not to say that the ethical defect in Titian's painting destroys its
artistic value, for there are some artistically valuable features of the painting
that do not depend upon the viewer's endorsing its eroticization of rape. But the
ethical defect does diminish the painting aesthetically in the way I've described.
It may be that the painting still counts as a great work of art but not as great
as previously thought.

NOTES

Manyt hankst o SvetlanaA lpers,L ee BrownD, avidC arrierJ,i mC onant,T edC ohen,
DavidF inkelsteinI,v anG askellM, arthaN ussbaumR, obertP ippinL, indaS eidel,M ary
Stroud,a nd threea nonymourse fereefsr omt his journalf or insightfucl ommentsa nd
criticismos n earlierd raftso f this paperI. ama lsog ratefutlo MatthewK ieranfo rp robing
remarkos n a shorterv ersionp resenteda t the annualm eetingo f the American
Societyf orA esthetics2, 001.D anW ackg avea thoughtfual ndh elpfulr esponsein the
ContemporarPyh ilosophWy orkshoapt theU niversityo f Chicagow, hereI alsor eceived
valuablec ommentfsr omS cottA ndersonT, imothyR osenkoetteGr, eorgeS treetera, nd
CandaceV oglerT. he authora pologizefso rb eingu nablet o obtainp ermissiontso include
reproductionosf Poussin'Rs apeo f theS abineW omen( 1634-5,o il on canvas,1 54.6x
209.9c m,M etropolitaMn useumo f Art,N ewY orka) ndT itian'sB acana(l1 520-1,o il on
canvas,1 75x 193c m, Museod el PradoM, adrid)R. eadercs an finda dequater eproductionso
f the Poussino n theW eba t <http://www.historywiz.com/images/rome/sabine.jpg>
and <www.kfki.hu/-arthp/artp/po/u ssin/2a/17sabinl.jpagn>d o f the Titiana t <http:
//www.abm-enterprises.net/titian_andrians.jpg>.

1. I maintain a broad and inclusive picture of the category of aesthetic value
that includesa rtisticv alue.

2. I use the terme thicismto refert o a familyo f viewst hat holdt hat an artwork's
ethicalv aluec anb earu pon,w ithoutn ecessarildye terminingit,s a estheticv alue.R ecent
advocateosf thisg enerapl ositionin cludeN oel Carrol(l1 996a nd1 998)M, aryD evereaux
(1998),M arciaE aton( 1997a nd 2001),B erysG aut( 1998),K arenH anson( 1998),a nd
MatthewK ieran( 1996).F ora recentr eviewo f ethicisms, ee Gaut2 001.

3. Althoughi rrelevantto the mattera t hand,t he questiono f whicht ext Titian
had in mindw hen makingt he paintingi s one that art historianst akes eriouslya nd that has spawned much debate. The traditional favorite is Ovid's (1994) Metamorphoses
(see, for example, Panofsky 1969 and more recently Barkan 1986, chap. 5), but many
are dissatisfied with this proposal because Titian's painting diverges from Ovid's text in
several significant ways. Other texts have then been suggested, such as Horace's Odes
(1934) and an obscure text by Moschus (see, for example, Shapiro 1971), but the favorite
alternative (first proposed by Rosand 1971-1972 and Stone 1972) to Ovid is a novel
entitled Leucippea ndC litophonb y the ancient Alexandrianw riterA chilles Tatius,w hich
appeared in Italian translation in Venice in 1560. (A complete English translation of
the relevant passage is available in Stone 1972.) However, some (for example, see Fehl
1976 and 1992, esp. 83-103) are dissatisfied with Achilles Tatius and insist that Ovid
(or Lodovico Dolce's 1553 paraphrase of Ovid) must be the true source. Perhaps a more
sensible view is Hilliard Goldfarb's contention that Titian did not intend his painting
to precisely illustrate any single antique text but rather freely interpreted his sources "in
his own spirit" (1998, 16). For a review of the debate about the painting's iconography,
see Goldfarb (1998, 12-16).

4. I do not mean to suggest that the intimations of nonconsensual sex come from
the painting alone, that is, from the painting considered in the absence of knowledge of
the myth. We must take the painting to representa moment in Europa'st oryi n ordert o
understand that nonconsensual sex will take place rather than, say, that it has already
taken place. I claim simply that once the painting is considered as a representation of a
moment in Europa'ss tory, these visual cues foreshadowt he imminent, nonconsensual
sexual violence.

5. I would like to thank an anonymous Hypatia reviewer for a concise formulation
of this objection to my claim that this painting represents a rape. The objection was first
put to me by Hilliard Goldfarb in a personal correspondence dated June 3, 1998. After
his arrival in 1991 as Chief Curator of Collections at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum (where the Titian hangs), Goldfarbc hanged, or as he puts it, "returned,"th e
title from Rape of Europa to the simpler Europa for the very reasons mentioned above.
(Goldfarb also had reasons for not calling the painting The Abduction of Europa.) I
respond to this objection below.

6. Although Titian did not, as far as we know, give this painting a title, he does
refer to it in a series of letters to his patron, Philip II of Spain, and there he does not
use the word "rape"( ratto)t o describet he painting (see Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1881).
The term ratto was first used in referring to the painting in 1626 by Cassiano dal Pozzo,
secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who gave the first precise description of the
painting while it was hanging in the lower vaulted galleries of the Alcazar in Madrid.
In his diary,d al Pozzod escribest he painting "l'rattod 'Europa"a nd referst o Europaa s
"[la] donzella rapita" (see Volk 1981). As mentioned in note 5 above, the painting was
thereafter called The Rape of Europa until Goldfarb changed, or as he puts it, "returned"
the title to the simpler Europa.

7. One need only look through the historical references of the Grande Dizionario
UTET (roughly the Italian equivalent of the OED) to see this. This use of rapire
to indicate sexual violation has a long history: the Vocabolariod egliA ccademicid ella
Crusca cites "il Maestruzzo"2 .30.6 (a text dated 1338) thus: "IIr atto non solamente
si commette nella vergine, ma anche, largamente preso, nella vedova e monaca" (s.v.
rapire).I am gratefult o ElissaW eaverf or help with this.

8. The following analogy should help to clarify this point. Imagine that I'm
baking a cake and am in the process of picking up an egg in order to break it over a bowl
when my sister snaps a photograph of me. If a friend later comes across the photograph
and asks my sister what I'm doing, it wouldn't be wrong to reply that I'm breaking eggs.
This is so despite the fact that, strictly speaking, the photograph merely represents my
holding an egg; broken eggs are nowhere to be found in the picture. It also wouldn't
be wrong to say that I'm baking a cake even though the photograph doesn't show even
the slightest beginnings of a cake. Indeed, it would be odd to describe my action in this
snapshots implyi n termso f what the pictures trictlyr epresents.T he frienda sks," What's
she doing?" My sister replies, "She's holding an egg." The friend responds exasperatedly,
"Well I can see that! But what'ss he doing?"T he friend sees that the picture represents
a step in a temporally extended activity and inquires into the whole of which the
thing pictured is but a part. This whole, the action in which my holding the egg is but
a stage, is characterized by my aim: I am holding an egg in order to break it in order to
combine it with flour and sugar and oil in order to produce a mix that I will pour into
a pan in order to bake a cake. But unless the achievement of my objective is dubious, to
the question "What is she doing?" one need not reply, "She is holding an egg in order
to bake a cake"; one can simply say, "She is baking a cake." This would be an accurate
and informative description of what I'm doing in the picture. This is not to say that it
would be wrong to describe my action represented in the photograph as holding an egg,
but, rather, that such a strict characterization would be uninformative and partial; it
wouldn't really tell you what I'm doing. Likewise, a fastidiously minimal description of
Titian'sp ainting as representingm erelyt he carryingo ff of Europai gnorest he aimo f this
action and so misses part of what the picture is about. (This discussion of intentional
action owes much to G. E. M. Anscombe's Intention [2000]).

9. As I discuss later in this section, it is difficult to see Europa's face because it
is shown at an oblique angle and partially obscured by the shadow that her arm casts.
Insofar as her face is legible, however, it strikes me as emotionally neutral, betraying
neither pleasure nor distress. (On the latter point it is instructive to compare Europa's
expression with that of Titian's Lucretia in the Cambridge painting from 1568-71,
which offers an excellent example of Titian's rendering of a woman's fearful expression
in a similar context.) It is striking that despite this neutrality, many art historians
make passing comments about her ecstatic expression, while still others describe her
as terrified. My own view, as discussed below, is that the picture is conflicted regarding
Europa'sp sychic state: on the one hand, because her subjectivity is not at issue here,
her facial expression is obscured precisely in order to emphasize her objectification; on
the other hand, it is a key element of the rape fantasy attributed to the painting (below)
that the rape be both pleasurable and agonizing for the victim and that she both resist
and participatei n the act. So although Europa'sfa cial expressiont aken by itself would
appear neutral, this neutrality allows it to take on the conflicting emotional states suggested
in other parts of the picture.

10. Of course,P oussin'sp icturet ells a very differentk ind of story-not one in which
a maiden is raped by a god but rather one in which Sabine wives and mothers are carried
off by enemy Roman troops. However, this difference is irrelevant to the matter at
hand. I use the painting here simply to provide a foil for the Titian in order to clarify
just what I mean by "eroticize."

11. This version of the Rape of the Sabine Women does provide one indication that at
least some of the Sabines went willingly and happily with the Romans: note the pair in
the middle-groundj ust left of the painting'sc enter who walk off together smiling. This
is part of what leads Norman Bryson (1986) to interpret the painting as reflecting on
the creation of law, order, and stable relations between the sexes rather than on sexual
violation.

12. This trades on a distinction between active engagemenat nd mere acquiescence.
One can passively comply with a rapist (under perceived threat of some sort-the threat
need not be physical), and so not actively resist, without nullifying the coercive and
assaultive dimension of the act. However, Titian's painting indicates more than Europa's
mere passive submission to the bull; it suggests that she will actively participate in the
sexual intercourse to follow.

13. I do not mean to deny the possibility of voluntarily acting out rape fantasies. But
in such cases both actors willinglye ngage in violence and the coercive aspect is simply
make-believes,o such scenarios should be distinguishedf rom actual acts of rape.

14. Many of these elements were first articulated and explicitly criticized by Susan
Brownmiller in Against Our Will (1975), although this fantasy has a long history that
predates Titian by centuries. Key elements of this fantasy are baldly and vociferously
expressed, for instance, in Ovid: "Though she give them not, yet take the kisses she
does not give. Perhaps she will struggle and at first cry, 'You villain!' Yet she will wish
to be beaten in the struggle ... You may use force; women like you to use it... She
whom a sudden assault has taken by storm is pleased ... But she who, when she might
have been compelled, departs untouched ... will yet be sad. Phoebe suffered violence,
violence was used against her sister; each ravisher found favor with the one ravished"
(Ovid 1939, 59). Although this is not the Ovidian text often considered to be the textual
source for Titian's painting (see note 3 above), one sees a less blatant expression of
this fantasy scatteredt hroughoutt he Metamorphoseass well. The role of rape in Ovid's
writings is a topic that is only beginning to receive critical attention (see Hemker 1985;
James 1997; Richlin 1991; Stirrup 1977; and Zissos 1999).

15. Some feminists make a convincing case that we live in a "rape culture," that is,
that rape and sexual assault permeate our society (see, for example, Buchwald, Fletcher,
and Roth 1993).O n the failingso f our currentl egal systemt o deal properlyw ith rape,s ee
Estrich (1987) and Taslitz (1999). On the pervasiveness of this rape fantasy in cultural
representation, see, for example, essays in Tomaselli and Porter (1986) and Higgins and
Silver (1991).

16. Guido Ruggiero's groundbreaking study on sex crimes in early Renaissance
Venice (1985) shows that this fantasyw as widespreadi n early-modernV enetian society
and had a strong hold on those in the position to make and enforce laws (both secular
and religious) regarding rape. For instance, although rape and fornication were distinct
concepts from a legal point of view, at trial rapes were commonly treated as cases of
fornication in which the victims were assumed to be at least partially responsible for
the rape. Claudio Povolo's work (1993 and 1997) suggests that the case was similar in
sixteenth-century Venice. The dominance of this fantasy of rape also held sway in other
partso f what we now call Italy,a s MaryG arrard's( 1989) monographo n ArtemisiaG entileschi
subtly and thoroughly demonstrates. Finally, George Vigarello's (1998) detailed
social history of rape from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries shows that assumptions that women enjoyed, solicited, and deserved rape were common in France
as well.

17. For a groundbreaking and interesting treatment of the dominance of this fantasy
in Italian Renaissance art, see Wolfthal (1999, chap. 1). Yael Even also skillfully
demonstrates the influence of this fantasy in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art (Even
2002, 2001, and 1992).

18. It may be that Senator Helms actuallyo bjects to the celebrationo f lifestylest hat
he considers unethical, but this is not how he typically expressed his objections to Mapplethorpe
and others. For example, he says,: "The American people in the vast majority
are aghast to learn that their tax money has been used to reward artists (for example,
the Mapplethorpe exhibit) who chose to depict sadomasochism, perverted homoerotic
sex acts and even sexual exploitation of children" (Bolton 1992, 75; italics added).

19. These paintings are discussed in a recent article in the The New York Times
entitled "Court Considers Ownership of Seized 'Hitler' Paintings" (7 May 2001, El) by
William Honan. Thanks to Scott Anderson for bringing this article to my attention.

20. This point is significant for distinguishing the ethical defect in Titian's painting
discussedh ere from the sort of ethical defects with which anti-pornographyfe minism
is concerned. Anti-porn feminism finds ethical fault with pornography because of its
purported connection with various harms: those that purportedly occur in the production
of pornography (for example, coerced sex, brutality, rape, psychological abuse, and
other exploitation sometimes inflicted upon women in making porn) and those that
purportedlyo ccur post-productiotnh rough its effects on men's attitudes and behavior.
(For an excellent recent survey of these arguments and criticisms, see Cornell 2000.)
Although one might attempt to connect Titian's painting with these sorts of harms and
thereby find ethical fault with the work, such is not the aim of this essay. As explained
below, the Rapeo f Europa'se thical defect at issue here does not depend on connecting
the picture with harm of any sort.

21. I get the term "vision" from Mary Devereaux (1998), who uses it to make her
argumenta bout Leni Riefestahl'sT riumpho f the Will (1980). This is a particularlya pt
way to think about a picture's ethical perspective.

22. Modern defenders of this view include Wayne Booth (1961 and 1988), who,
although not employing the language of teleology, provides a sensitive, compelling,
and detailed justification for the view that a proper understanding of fiction requires
thinking about the demands that works make upon the audience. Devereaux (2001)
explicitly argues for the need to understand artworks teleologically when judging them
ethically.

23. Although Gaut does not, to my knowledge, make use of Booth's concept of the
implied author, this is clearly the sort of thing Gaut has in mind in his discussion of a
work's" attitudes"m anifest in the responsesi t prescribest owarde vents, characters,a nd
the like (see Gaut 1998). For an explanation of the concept of the implied author, see
Booth (1961, esp. 70-76, 211-21; and 1988, esp. chap. 6).

24. Although Booth does not use the term "prescribe,h"e does provide a masterful
and detailed account of the various rhetorical literary devices that aim to shape readers'
responses and convincingly argues that a proper understanding of fiction requires
attention to its rhetoric

25. Michael Baxandall (1985) provides one of the most subtle and informative
explanation of pictures' aims.

26. This argumento wes much to anti-pornographfye minists.T he argument,I think,
has its roots in John Stuart Mill's The Subjectiono f Women (1988), and is most fully
developed by Catharine MacKinnon (esp. 2001, sec. 10.2; 1993; 1991; 1989, chap. 11;
1987, chaps. 11-16; and MacKinnon and Dworkin 1997). My outline here is indebted
to Joshua Cohen's (1996, 103-105) reconstruction of anti-porn feminism, although I
differ from Cohen on several significant points.

27. Brownmiller (1975) provided the first thorough and eloquent explanation of
rape's function as a means to keep women in a state of fear and thereby perpetuate male
dominance. For more recent accounts of rape as a technique for maintaining gender
inequality see Stock (1991) and MacKinnon (1989, chap. 9; 2001, chap. 7.1).

28. The notion that eroticizing sex inequality is an effective means for promoting
and sustaining that inequality was first suggested by Mill (1988). Although this idea
filters through contemporary anti-porn feminism, few acknowledge its origin.

29. As noted in note 20, above, this means that the kind of ethical fault at issue
here fundamentally differs from those ethical faults that anti-porn feminists attribute
to pornography, which depend upon causal claims about the effects of pornography
consumption. Although I rely upon anti-porn feminism to explain what's wrong with
responding to rape with erotic feelings, the ethical defect discussed here need not take
a stand on whether the Titian does in fact engender such feelings.

30. This is the view that Noel Carroll (1996) calls "radical moralism."

31. Another form this interest can take involves an argument that artworks can
morally edify by serving as models for moral reflection and offering occasions for moral
understandinga nd imagination( see, for example,C arroll1 996 and 1998;F reeland1 997;
Nussbaum 1985, 1990, and 1998; and Murdoch 1970). Elaine Scarry (1999) holds the
related view that our experience of the beautiful (she does not limit her discussion to
artworks) leads to attitudes of fairness and justice.

32. Not all contemporary ethicists rely upon the assimilation model (see, for
example, Devereaux 1998).

33. Gaut argues that "a work's manifestation of ethically bad attitudes is an aesthetic
defect in it. Mutatis mutandis, a parallel argument shows that a work's manifestation of
ethically commendable attitudes is an aesthetic merit in it" (1998, 196). Carroll adds
that "some works of art may be evaluated morally ... and sometimes the moral defects
and/or merits of a work may figure in the aesthetic evaluation of a work" (1996, 236).

34. In turning to Hume for a model of ethicism, I do not mean to endorse all aspects
of his aesthetics or his theory of value (for example, his projectivism). In particular, I
do not stand behind his apparent appeal to duration of approval as an indication of the
high artistic value of artworks (see, for example, Hume 1985, 233). Feminism's critique
of canon formation gives us good reason, I think, to be skeptical of accepting the test
of time as a benchmark of aesthetic value (see, for example, Pollock 1999). But this and
other problems in Hume need not concern us here, for his ethicism can be abstracted
from much of his theoretical work on aesthetics and value.

35. Although he does not explicitly mention Hume, Booth (1988) draws and makes
much of an analogy between friendship and one's relationship with artworks

36. Hume might opt for this characterizationo f the wayi n which a work'si mmorality
interferes with the capacity to take pleasure in an object, for he considers it a psychological
fact that "all resembling impressions are connected together, and no sooner
one arises than the rest immediately follow" (1978, 283). Since Hume takes it that the
passion aroused by vice resembles the emotion aroused by deformity in that both are
painful impressions, it might happen that the painful impression aroused by the vice
sets the stage for the emotion aroused by deformity to follow. The reason that this does
not happen the other way around (that is, that the pleasurable emotion aroused by the
pleasing features of the work does not take precedence) is that, according to Hume,
violent passions (which include vice) have a stronger grip on us than calm emotions
such as those associated with beauty.

37. Daniel Jacobson makes a similar analogy to argue against an interference-model
for the relevance of ethical concepts to the funniness of jokes. Although there may
be circumstances that prevent one from laughing at a joke (for instance, that it would
disrupt a public lecture), this does not mean that the joke should be blamed for failing
to warrant laughter (1997, 174).

38. For the difficulties involved, see Cohen (1999).

39. What Aristotle means by catharsisn eed not concern us here, which is fortunate
since the meaning of the term is a matter of great dispute. See, for instance, Barnes
1995, Halliwell 1986, Lear 1992, and Nussbaum 1992.

40. Thanks to Matthew Kieran for this suggestion.

41. This concern has been raised independently in conversation by David Finkelstein
and William Tashek, neither of whom is the least bit creepy. I am grateful to both
for their thoughtful comments.

42. Booth makes this point brilliantly when he discusses the ways in which readers
must take on a character, if only for the duration of their engagement with a work, in
order to meet the invitation of the implied author (Booth 1988, esp. chap. 8).

43. Few contemporary ethicists appear to take this point seriously. An exception is
Devereaux's( 1998) scrupulousr eading of Riefenstahl'sT riumpho f the Will (1934).
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/apr/11/art.germany

Image: 'It's not a concept that can easily be explained'... Vanessa Beecroft stands in front of VB55 at the New National Gallery, Berlin. Photo: Arnd Wiegmann/ Reuters

Text: Luke Harding for the Guardian

Take 100 nudes ...

Vanessa Beecroft persuades women to pose naked in public. Is it challenging art or merely soft porn for intellectuals? Luke Harding caught up with her latest show in Berlin

Her critics accuse her of exploiting women. Her fans praise her as a bold and daring feminist. Either way, the queues to see Vanessa Beecroft's latest work in Berlin were extremely long - hardly surprising, one suspects, given that the art on offer involved 100 naked women.

The performance was the biggest ever staged by Beecroft, a 35-year-old New York-based conceptual artist who has been staging nude tableaux vivants since 1993. Gradually, they have attracted increasing attention, to the point where a Beecroft performance is now a major international arts event. She has sometimes dressed her naked models in high heels and garish red, yellow or platinum wigs. At the preview of her latest show, Beecroft said that she had tried this time to keep her models as "natural" as possible. For her latest performance, entitled "VB55" and staged in Berlin's New National Gallery, the women were wearing see-through tights. What, though, was it all about? And did the show - introduced by two German professors - amount to anything more than soft porn for intellectuals?

"I want the women to be slightly hypnotised, so they appear removed and detached from the audience," she says. "It's not a concept that can be easily explained. I would say it includes embarrassment, shame, violence and abuse. There is a feeling of embarrassment, no matter if the viewer is a man or a woman." Is she embarrassed by her own performances, then? "Yes, I am."

Certainly, there is plenty about Beecroft's work that is voyeuristic. But the most interesting aspect is almost its cold and calculating cruelty: the public performance lasted for three long hours. Apart from the odd stretch and yawn, the women are instructed to remain as still and silent as possible. They are warned not to "act sexy". Towards the end they can lie on the floor. At the preview, attended by dozens of journalists and TV crews, several of the "girls", as Beecroft calls them, sat down exhausted. Most looked distinctly bored.

For VB55, ordinary women aged 18 to 65 were chosen, rather than professional models; the artist also used more women than ever before. Their hair colours - red, yellow and black - were picked to allude to Germany's flag.

"I didn't mind being naked. After a while you don't even notice. The problem is that nobody told us how to look," one 27-year-old volunteer, Nina Petereit, grumbled afterwards. "The artist gave us no direction. I didn't find it very structured." She added: "It was also really cold and the vegetarian food they gave us was awful."

Prior to being sent out to stand naked before the public, the women were rubbed in almond oil, the rather bizarre result being to give them shiny breasts. "I consider my performances to be one body of work stored in different parts of the world," Beecroft explains. "It's almost like an experiment in directing, in an almost brutal and violent way, women in front of an audience ... There are references to paintings, images, movies and texts."

Not everyone shares her high opinion of her work, however. One critic said that there was nothing wrong with women taking all their clothes off, but that in Beecroft's case the result was "trivial", "cliched" and "unchallenging". Others, though, detect hidden influences from classical painting - Rembrandt, Holbein, Della Francesca, have all been mentioned - as well as Renaissance sculpture and European cinema. (Beecroft says she is a keen admirer of Helmut Newton and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.) Each of her shows is exhaustively videoed, with photographers allowed to take close-up shots, a practice that verges on the creepy. Dealers then flog the results. The performances are titled in strict mathematical sequence after the artist's initials (VB01, VB02, VB25, VB55 etc).

Beecroft, a petite figure in a buttoned-up raincoat, made no mention of her long struggle with bulimia - one factor, surely, in her almost callous use of female nudity. The daughter of an Italian mother and British father, she has had an obsessive relationship with food since her early teens. She has admitted to crash-dieting with amphetamines, taking anti-depressives, smoking to keep her weight down, and exercising compulsively. Her first show in 1993 was based on her Book of Food - a diary she kept between 1983 and 1993 detailing everything she had ever eaten. The diary was placed in the middle of a Milan art gallery; Beecroft then directed 30 women, most of them fellow art students dressed in her own clothes, to move around it. This first "performance" became the template for future shows. Over time, an element of nudity crept in, to the point where a Beecroft performance would now seem inconceivable without it. As her reputation grew, fashion designers such as Miuccia Prada, Helmut Lang and Dolce & Gabbana began providing her with clothes.

These days, Beecroft doesn't strip off herself and join her models; she did, however, recently pose naked at her rural home in Long Island, which she shares with her husband Greg Durkin, 28, and their sons, Dean and Virgil.

Whether her work is any good or not, though, there is no doubt that Beecroft's latest venue was well chosen. The modernist New National Gallery or Neue Nationalgalerie was designed by Mies van der Rohe, and is one of Berlin's most prestigious buildings. It is completely transparent - allowing passers-by to stare at a lot of naked flesh. Indeed, a group of Italian schoolchildren gawped dumbfounded through the glass after turning up at the preview by accident.

Source: http://www.jstor.org.prxy4.ursus.maine.edu/stable/10.1086/521563?&Search=yes&searchText=beecroft&searchText=vanessa&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dvanessa%2Bbeecroft%26gw%3Djtx%26acc%3Don%26prq%3Dsasha%2Bcohen%2Bbaron%26Search%3DSearch%26hp%3D25%26wc%3Don&prevSearch=&item=10&ttl=74&returnArticleService=showFullText

Image: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&q=Pin%E2%80%90Up+Grrrls:+Feminism,+Sexuality,+Popular+Culture,+Maria+Elena+Buszek&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&biw=1970&bih=1179&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=13456976369799437665&sa=X&ei=8um6TbWsJ6Hw0gHJhZXsBQ&ved=0CEUQ8wIwAA#

Text: Kristen Hutchinson, Whitman College

 

Book Review

Reviewed work(s): Pinâ€�Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture. By Marina Elena  Buszek. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire. By Jennifer  Doyle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject. By Amelia  Jones. London: Routledge, 2006.

Kristen Hutchinson

Whitman College

She lies languidly, one knee raised, one arm crossed behind her head as a black telephone receiver is held in her other hand. Her white robe opens to reveal a black almost see�through shift, revealing two large pink nipples. She has impossibly long legs and flawless, glowing white skin.

When thinking of the pinup as a genre, Alberto Vargas’s 1940 watercolor painting of the first Varga Girl to appear in Esquire magazine is the type of image that immediately comes to mind. She is lean, long, and leggy. She looks away from the viewer, thus inviting us to examine the details of her idealized form. Perhaps one thinks of photographs of Betty Grable pinned onto barrack walls by soldiers during World War II as the typical pinup, or of Bettie Page clad in dominatrix gear. How might these images be interpreted not simply as representations that objectify women but as complex and subversive images of female sexuality? In her book Pinâ€�Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, Marina Elena Buszek sets out to accomplish this difficult task. Buszek has written a convincing and detailed account of how the genre of the pinup and the histories of feminisms intersect. By examining images from the late nineteenth century until the present, Buszek reevaluates the pinup as a potentially feminist object because of its power to “possess and transgress traditional feminine roles” (154).

Buszek defines the pinup in its most basic form as “an image of an individual meant for display and concentrated observation” (8). However, through her detailed analysis of how pinups functioned in various eras, she renders the genre compellingly complex by examining it as “an image of womanhood that was at once subversive and status quo” (157). Buszek deconstructs presumptions about the pinup by expanding the genre to include images produced by women. She pays much attention to the pinup as a marketing device for actresses, burlesque performers, and film stars from the late 1800s until the 1940s. For example, she writes of the nineteenthâ€�century burlesque pinup as providing a legacy for the genre: “always peculiarly and emphatically herself. … Representing its beautiful/beautifying subjects as not only selfâ€�aware, sexual, and professional beings, but beings whose identities were selfâ€�constructed, selfâ€�controlled, and everâ€�changing, the pinâ€�up both represented and marked as desirable a spectrum of female identities possible” (66). In addition, she expands the discourse around the pinup, typically thought of as a white woman produced for masculine desire, by including examples of how lesbians and women of color have also taken up this iconic image. Buszek demonstrates that the pinup contains the possibility of conflating “traditional standards of physical beauty with unconventional elements of intelligence and sexual awareness” (240).

Buszek’s book is also an excellent source about particular moments in the history of the feminist movement, from the suffragists to secondâ€� and thirdâ€�wave feminisms. Through her thorough examination of these movements, she draws thoughtâ€�provoking parallels between the production of pinups, how women were inscribed and perceived in various eras, women’s everyday experiences, and their fights for equality. Last, her analysis of how female artists in the last thirty years have subversively appropriated the pinup is particularly insightful. On the cover of the book is a 2003 photograph by Nicole Cawlfield of a Bettie Page type standing on a scale. Dressed in a bathing suit and black high heels, she holds a cake while she licks a spatula covered in icing. This image presents a typical pinup as described by Buszek, a woman who is sexually provocative, multifaceted, and powerful. She can have her cake and eat it too.

In a series of case studies on diverse artworks and artists, Jennifer Doyle’s Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire examines representations of men and women as sexual objects in literature and visual art. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick; Thomas Eakins’s paintings and photographs; Andy Warhol’s films, drawings, and silk screens; Tracey Emin’s sculptures, installations, and drawings; and Vanessa Beecroft’s and Vaginal Davis’s performances are all posited as exemplary of “the intersections between art and desire” (xvii). A number of threads weave throughout the disparate essays, including examinations of sexual interest, boredom, queer theory, sexuality, feminisms, gender differences, the body, and the nature of desire. While Doyle does look at sexual images in terms of pleasure, her focus is not on art as an exercise in positivist liberation. Rather, Doyle explores the underbelly of sexual representations of anxiety, rage, and boredom.

In the first chapter, Doyle considers how sexuality and sexual difference play out in the works of Eakins. Eakins’s unconventional teaching methods, such as his use of both male and female models and getting naked with his students, as well as the fact that he was linked to sex scandals, are positioned as a backdrop to interrogate not only the images themselves but also how Eakins has been constructed as a gay male artist. In her examination of Warhol’s twoâ€�dimensional works, Doyle criticizes how critics have placed his work “under the rubric of prostitution” (46) by ascertaining that Warhol meant to “exploit the incoherencies and contradictions in and around definitions of work to challenge available models of authorship, art, and sex” (46). Her discussion of the roles played by women as sexual, boring, and bored in Warhol’s films is especially interesting given that little has been written about the predominant presence of women in his films. Her discussion of the small role played by Valerie Solanas, the selfâ€�described lesbian feminist who shot Warhol, is particularly fascinating. Doyle writes that “Solanas’s performance in I, a Man makes clear that women in Warhol’s films actively destabilize heterosexuality and its institutions” (80). The question of what it means to represent boring or bad sex in art is taken up in the analysis of Emin. Doyle argues that Emin turns “the travesties of a sexual life into everyday banalities” (105). Finally, Doyle writes about a performance by Los Angeles artist Vaginal Davis, a gay black man who takes on the guise of white female artist Vanessa Beecroft. In so doing, Davis deconstructs Beecroft’s performances in order to reveal their “complicity with the economics of interest and value that underpin the gallery system” (129).

A strong focus throughout the book is an interrogation of how representations of sex in art have been written about and what it means to do so. What is striking are the ways in which Doyle interrogates her own position as a writer and as a viewer. For instance, in discussing a 1960 print by Warhol titled Where Is Your Rupture? she writes, “My interest in this work is not as noble, however, as an academic’s commitment to allegorical valuation: I like it because I think it is talking to me, I take it as about me. It indulges my narcissism” (102). In addition, she asks those who write about art and literature “to reconsider how to draw the boundaries of our work” (xxxi). One example is her questioning of how feminist theory can coexist with discussions of gay male sexuality so as to allow for a more expansive arena for queer studies. Although Doyle and Buszek write about rather different subjects, both books enact an unraveling of assumptions by complicating the notions of sexuality, gender, and sex.

Amelia Jones’s Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject investigates the myriad ways contemporary artists employ technologies (film, video, digital video, analog and digital photography, medical cameras, robotic prostheses, video projections) to explore what it means to be an embodied subject. Jones argues that “technology not only mediates but produces subjectivities, deeply inflecting how we experience ourselves in the contemporary world” (44). Jones has written a thoughtâ€�provoking book that provides inventive theorization of artists who depict bodies: Cindy Sherman, Pipilotti Rist, Renée Cox, Lyle Ashton Harris, Laura Aguilar, Claude Cahun, Hannah Wilke, Nikki S. Lee, Carolee Schneeman, Stelarc, Orlan, and Guillermo Gómezâ€�Peña, among others. Like the discussions of artworks contained within, the structure of Jones’s book is also innovative. Each chapter is punctuated or punctured by four to five page breaks that “offer long, intentionally overâ€�invested, bodily interpretations of visual works” (xvii) in contrast to the chapters that “develop specific arguments about specific technologies of representation and aspects of contemporary subjectivity” (xviii). Jones also covers a wide crossâ€�section of theorists in relation to the artworks under discussion: Vivian Sobchack, Roland Barthes, Laura U. Marks, Maurice Merleauâ€�Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudillard, and Joan Copjec, to name but a few. By deftly linking these theoretical viewpoints to the artworks, Jones successfully uncovers how “the complexity of subject formation” (50) can be revealed through representation.

Her chapter on selfâ€�portrait photographs is particularly noteworthy since it argues that these artists demonstrate that beneath the mask of performative selfâ€�portraits lies yet another mask. Direct correlations between photograph and document, self and image, are thus undone. Rather than portraiture functioning to solidify a fixed identity, these selfâ€�portraits are invocations of the fluidity and malleability of identity. Importantly, in a process similar to Doyle’s, Jones acknowledges her own subjectivity in her theoretical readings of these artworks. For example, about Aguilar’s 1996 photograph Nature Selfâ€�Portrait #4, in which the artist lies naked on rocky landscape with her body reflected in a small pool of water, Jones writes: “the fact that I experience her in terms of difference simply serves to highlight the fact that my normativity (white, thin, nervous, queer in attitude but heterosexual in practice) is otherness in relation to Aguilar’s apparent identifications [Latina, lesbian, and full figured]” (64). Jones provides an insightful chapter on Stelarc, well known for the use of robotic prostheses in his performances. She argues against the artist’s proclamations that the body is obsolete. Jones contends that rather than transcending the body, Stelarc’s works are deeply embodied because of their inherent acknowledgment of “the specificity of the bodies (and subjects) that are in question at every moment and in every operational system” (194). The book also explores two other undertheorized areas: projected images of the body and representations of the body in relation to the urban environment.

A pivotal concept in Jones’s book is “the never enough of representation in relation to embodied experience” (22). Jones thus contends that an artwork can never fully capture what it is to live in one’s body. Perhaps it is this sense of “never enough” that continually propels contemporary artists to adapt and explore new technologies in a quest to understand embodiment as a complicated combination of mind and body. The artists analyzed by Jones share a common project in revealing subjectivity as multifaceted and diverse rather than unitary and coherent. Examinations of the complexities of subjectivity form a common thread among the authors under discussion here. Buszek and Doyle, albeit from different vantage points, pose the same question asked by Jones: “How does the image relate to the self?” (1).

© 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.

Source: http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/

Image: Austin Kleon

Text: Austin Kleon

NOTES ON WRITING AND DRAWING

HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST (AND 9 OTHER THINGS NOBODY TOLD ME)

By Austin Kleon

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

How to steal like an artist (and 9 other things nobody told me)

Note: This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave yesterday at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. It’s a simple list of 10 things I wish I’d heard when I was in college.

All advice is autobiographical.

It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past. This list is me talking to a previous version of myself.

Your mileage may vary.

1. Steal like an artist.

Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”

The honest artist answers, “I steal them.”

I drew this cartoon a few years ago. There are two panels. Figure out what’s worth stealing. Move on to the next thing.

That’s about all there is to it.

Here’s what artists understand. It’s the a three-word sentence that fills me with hope every time I read it:

Nothing is original.

It says it right there in the Bible. Ecclesiastes:

“That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.”

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of previous ideas.

Here’s a trick they teach you in art school. Draw two parallel lines on a piece of paper:

How many lines are there? There’s the first line, the second line, but then there’s a line of negative space that runs between them. See it?

1 + 1 = 3.

The genealogy of Ideas

Speaking of lines, here’s a good example of what I’m talking about: genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You’re a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.

You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see.

Jay-Z talks about this in his book, Decoded:

“ We were kids without fathers…so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves…Our fathers were gone, usually because they just bounced, but we took their old records and used them to build something fresh.”

You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”

An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love.

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

My mom used to say to me, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

It used to drive me nuts. But now I know what she means.

Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.

Identify one writer you really love. Find everything they’ve ever written. Then find out what they read. And read all of that. Climb up your own family tree of writers.

Steal things and save them for later. Carry around a sketchpad. Write in your books. Tear things out of magazines and collage them in your scrapbook.

Steal like an artist.

2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to start making things.

There was a video going around the internet last year of Rainn Wilson, the guy who plays Dwight on The Office. He was talking about creative block, and he said this thing that drove me nuts, because I feel like it’s a license for so many people to put off making things: “If you don’t know who you are or what you’re about or what you believe in it’s really pretty impossible to be creative.”

If I waited to know “who I was” or “what I was about” before I started “being creative”, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.

You’re ready. Start making stuff.

You might be scared. That’s natural.

There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called imposter syndrome. The clinical definition is a “psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments.” It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing.

Guess what?

None of us do. I had no idea what I was doing when I started blacking out newspaper columns. All I knew was that it felt good. It didn’t feel like work. It felt like play.

Ask any real artist, and they’ll tell you the truth: they don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.

Have you ever heard of dramaturgy? It’s a fancy sociological term for something this guy in England said about 400 years ago:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts…”

Another way to say this:

Fake it til you make it

I love this phrase. There’s two ways to read it: Fake it ‘til you make it, as in, fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want, etc. Or, fake it til’ you make it, as in, pretend to be making something until you actually make something. I love that idea.

I also love the book Just Kids by Patti Smith. I love it because it’s a story about how two friends moved to New York and learned to be artists. You know how they learned to be artists? They pretended to be artists. I’ll spoil the book for you and describe my favorite scene, the turning scene in the book: Patti Smith and her friend Robert Maplethorpe dress up in all their gypsy gear and they go to Washington Square, where everybody’s hanging out, and this old couple kind of gawks at them, and the woman says to her husband, “Oh, take their picture. I think they’re artists.” “Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”

The point is: all the world’s a stage. You need a stage and you need a costume and you need a script. The stage is your workspace. It can be a studio, a desk, or a sketchbook. The costume is your outfit, your painting pants, or your writing slippers, or your funny hat that gives you ideas. The script is just plain old time. An hour here, or an hour there. A script for a play is just time measured out for things to happen.

Fake it ’til you make it.

3. Write the book you want to read.

Quick story:

Jurassic Park came out on my 10th birthday. I loved it. I was kind of obsessed with it. I mean, what 10-year-old wasn’t obsessed with that movie? The minute I left my little small-town theater, I was dying for a sequel.

I sat down the next day at our old green-screen PC and typed out a sequel. In my treatment, the son of the game warden eaten by velociraptors goes back to the island with the granddaughter of the guy who built the park. See, one wants to destroy the rest of the park, the other wants to save it. Of course, they fall in love and adventures ensue.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was writing what we now call fan fiction—fictional stories based on characters that already exist.

10-year-old me saved the story to the hard drive.

Then, a few years later, Jurassic Park 2 came out.

And it sucked.

The sequel *always* sucks compared to the sequel in our heads.

write what you like

The question every young writer asks is: “What should I write?”

And the cliched answer is, “Write what you know.”

This advice always leads to terrible stories in which nothing interesting happens.

The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s write what you *like*.

Write the kind of story you like best.

We make art because we like art.

All fiction, in fact, is fan fiction.

The best way to find the work you should be doing is to think about the work you want to see done that isn’t being done, and then go do it.

Draw the art you want to see, make the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read.

4. Use your hands.

My favorite cartoonist, Lynda Barry, she has this saying: “In the digital age, don’t forget to use your digits! Your hands are the original digital devices.”

When I was in creative writing workshops in college, all manuscripts had to be in double-spaced, Times New Roman font. And my stuff was just terrible. It wasn’t until I started making writing with my hands that writing became fun and my work started to improve.

The more I stay away from the computer, the better my ideas get. Microsoft Word is my enemy. I use it all the time at work. I try to stay away from it the rest of my life.

I think the more that writing is made into a physical process, the better it is. You can feel the ink on paper. You can spread writing all over your desk and sort through it. You can lay it all out where you can look at it.

People ask me why I don’t develop an iPhone or iPad Newspaper Blackout app, and I tell them  because I think there is magic in feeling the newsprint in your hand and the words disappearing under that marker line. A lot of your senses are engaged–even the smell of the fumes add to the experience.

Art that only comes from the head isn’t any good. Watch any good musician and you’ll see what I mean.

When I’m making the poems, it doesn’t feel like work. It feels like play.

So my advice is to find a way to bring your body into your work. Draw on the walls. Stand up when you’re working. Spread things around the table.

Use your hands.

5. Side projects and hobbies are important.

Speaking of play — one thing I’ve learned in my brief tenure as an artist: it’s the side projects that blow up.

By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens.

The blackout poems were a side project. Had I been focused only on my goal of writing short fiction, had I not allowed myself the room to experiment, I’d never be where I am now.

It’s also important to have a hobby. Something that’s just for you. Music is my hobby. (That’s me at Guitar Center.)

While my art is for the world to see, music is for me and my friends. We get together every Sunday and make noise for a couple of hours. It’s wonderful.

So the lesson is: take time to mess around. Have a hobby. It’s good for you, and you never know where it may lead you…

6. The secret: do good work and put it where people can see it.

I get a lot of e-mails from young artists who ask how they can find an audience. “How do I get discovered?”

I sympathize with them. There was a kind of fallout that happened when I left college. The classroom is a wonderful, if artificial place: your professor gets paid to pay attention to your ideas, and your classmates are paying to pay attention to your ideas.

Never in your life will you have such a captive audience.

Soon after, you learn that most of the world doesn’t necessarily care about what you think. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. As Steven Pressfield said, “It’s not that people are mean or cruel, they’re just busy.”

If there was a secret formula for getting an audience, or gaining a following, I would give it to you. But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: “Do good work and put it where people can see it.”

It’s a two step process.

Step one, “do good work,” is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Fail. Get better.

Step two, “put it where people can see it,” was really hard up until about 10 years ago. Now, it’s very simple: “put your stuff on the internet.”

I tell people this, and then they ask me, “What’s the secret of the internet?”

Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.

You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about. If everybody’s wondering about apples, go wonder about oranges.

One of the things I’ve learned as an artist is that the more open you are about sharing your passions, the more people love your art.

Artists aren’t magicians. There’s no penalty for revealing your secrets.

Believe it or not, I get a lot of inspiration from people like Bob Ross and Martha Stewart. Bob Ross taught people how to paint. He gave his secrets away. Martha Stewart teaches you how to make your house and your life awesome. She gives her secrets away.

People love it when you give your secrets away, and sometimes, if you’re smart about it, they’ll reward you by buying the things you’re selling.

When you open up your process and invite people in, you learn. I’ve learned so much from the folks who submit poems to the Newspaper Blackout site. I find a lot of things to steal, too. It benefits me as much as it does them.

So my advice: learn to code. Figure out how to make a website. Figure out blogging. Figure out Twitter and all that other stuff. Find people on the internet who love the same things as you and connect with them. Share things with them.

7. Geography is no longer our master.

I’m so glad I’m alive right now.

I grew up in the middle of a cornfield in Southern Ohio. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live in Austin, Texas. They live on the internet.

Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

8. Be nice. The world is a small town.

I’ll keep this short. There’s only one reason I’m here. I’m here to make friends.

Kurt Vonnegut said it best: “There’s only one rule I know of: goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

The golden rule is even more golden in our hyper-connected world.

An important lesson to learn: if you talk about someone on the internet, they will find out. Everybody has a Google alert on their name.

The best way to vanquish your enemies on the internet? Ignore them.

The best way to make friends on the internet? Say nice things about them.

9. Be boring. It’s the only way to get work done.

As Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

I’m a boring guy with a 9-5 job who lives in a quiet neighborhood with his wife and his dog.

That whole romantic image of the bohemian artist doing drugs and running around and sleeping with everyone is played out. It’s for the superhuman and the people who want to die young.

The thing is: art takes a lot of energy to make. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.

Some things that have worked for me:

Take care of yourself.

Eat breakfast, do some pushups, get some sleep. Remember what I said earlier about good art coming from the body?

Stay out of debt.

Live on the cheap. Pinch pennies. Freedom from monetary stress means freedom in your art.

Get a day job and keep it.

A day job gives you money, a connection to the world, and a routine. Parkinson’s law: work expands to fill the time allotted. I work a 9-5 and I get about as as much art done now as I did when I worked part-time.

Get yourself a calendar. (And a logbook.)

You need a chart of future events, and you need a chart of past events.

Art is all about the slow accumulation over time. Writing a page one day doesn’t seem like much. Do it for 365 days and you have a big novel.

A calendar helps you plan work. This is the calendar I used for my book:

A calendar gives you concrete goals, keeps you on track,  and the nice reward of crossing things off and watching the boxes fill up.

Any goal you want to accomplish: get yourself a calendar. Break the task down into little bits of time. Make it a game.

For past events, I suggest a logbook. It’s not a regular journal, it’s just a little book in which you list the things you do every day. You’d be amazed at how helpful having a daily record like this can be, especially over several years.

Marry well.

It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.

And marry well doesn’t just mean your life partner — it also means who you do business with, who you befriend, who you choose to be around.

10. Creativity is subtraction.

It’s often what an artist chooses to leave out that makes the art interesting. What isn’t shown vs. what is.

In this age of information overload and abundance, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s important to them.

Devoting yourself to something means shutting out other things.

What makes you interesting isn’t just what you’ve experienced, but also what you haven’t experienced.

The same is true when you make art: you must embrace your limitations and keep moving.

Creativity isn’t just the things we chose to put in, it’s also the things we chose to leave out. Or black out.

And that’s all I think I have.

Thanks, y’all.

____

Austin Kleon is a writer and artist living in Austin, Texas. He's the author of Newspaper Blackout.

Austin Kleon  Artist Statement

I’m a writer who draws.

I’m a visual thinker obsessed with the art of communicating with pictures and words, together.

I’m probably best known for my Newspaper Blackout Poems—poetry made by redacting words from newspaper articles with a permanent marker. I started making them in 2005 when I was right out of college and facing a nasty case of writer’s block. The poems spread around the internet, and in April 2010, Harper Perennial published a collection, Newspaper Blackout. New York Magazine called the book “brilliant” and The New Yorker said the poems “resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead.”

I also draw cartoons and take visual notes at live events in my sketchbook for folks such as Austin City Limits, TEDxAustin, and SXSW.

I’m fascinated by the possibilities of being online, and I’m always thinking about how to use the web as a medium to make things happen. By day, I’m a copywriter at Springbox.

I’m a “big picture” guy who loves to talk. I get a kick out of teaching folks how to create better work through visual thinking and play.

I grew up in the middle of a cornfield in southern Ohio. I quickly learned that books and music are the things that keep me happy and sane. I read, read, read, and whenever I get the chance, I sit at the piano or pick up the guitar and write songs.

After spending the first two decades of my life in Ohio, I now live in Austin, Texas with my wife Meghan and our dog Milo.

this is the beginning of some research that im interested in compiling
having to do with the clear, chartable collapse of the american avant-garde.

Heres the put: the avant garde is completely undone, has no place - in fact
the words should not be spoken, except in an historical context, we have
collapsed the system, the tree is felled, there is no top, only tangent. If we
have collectively, quietly changed course, and the course itself from a race
to the top to a race to the edges then there can be no forward or back and
as a result of the posture there can be no vanguard as we have accepted the
term to mean:

" The term was originally used to describe the foremost part of an army advancing into battle (also called the vanguard or literally the advance guard) and now applied to any group, particularly of artists, that considers itself innovative and ahead of the majority.[3]
The vanguard, a small troop of highly skilled soldiers, explores the terrain ahead of a large advancing army and plots a course for the army to follow. This concept is applied to the work done by small collectives of intellectuals and artists as they open pathways through new cultural or political terrain for society to follow."

There must be some fine writing on the topic, I have decided today to make this a territroy of
research, anyone interested in throwing logs of writing on the fire are welcome to do so.

 

Many advance thanks

daniel

Source:  http://www.strikingdistance.com/xtra/XTra100/v2n3/ajones1.html

Image: Robert Mapplethorpe

Text: Amelia Jones

“Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure”: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics

By Amelia Jones

    By stating, in 1849, that "every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure,"1 John Ruskin blithely and self-confidently naturalized the determination of "beauty"; at the same time, he explicitly acknowledged the extent to which beauty’s obviousness is always subjective ("every man knows…"). This dual gesture, which affirms universality even as it admits particularity, structures the aesthetic (the discursive and institutional structuring of what we consider to be "art").

    We can at least historicize Ruskin’s comment, which was issued from the midst of the heatedly romantic, simultaneously self-assured and culturally anxious moment of mid-nineteenth-century Europe–with its cultural imperialism and burgeoning capitalist markets. Such hubris in the matter of claiming absolute personal authority for aesthetic judgments is, however, unforgivable in its renewed formulations in the current era of late-capitalist neo-nationalism, multi-culturalism, and contentious public/private funding debates. Nonetheless, a group of eager art critics supported by the Los Angeles-based venues The Los Angeles Times and the Art issues. magazine and press, have won awards and gained public acclaim for repeating just such noxious–and, one would have thought, outmoded–claims.

     Thus, most notoriously, in 1993 Dave Hickey published a book with Art issues. press in which he openly claims allegiance with Ruskin (unctuously citing the latter in the acknowledgments as his "Victorian mentor"). Entitled The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, the book stages itself, rather self-contradictorily, as a radical corrective to so-called "political correctness" (or PC)–the supposed hegemony of narrow-minded "art professionals" who currently administer "a monolithic system of interlocking patronage."2 Hickey, then, strategically poses himself as correcting what he characterizes as an egregious bureaucratization of art through academic discourses of identity and cultural politics. Hickey, describing himself modestly as "admittedly outrageous," generously offers himself as the savior of art from ideology (the oldest trick in the long book of aesthetics–a trick that authorizes the disciplines of art criticism and art history in their more traditional modes). Thus, with the revival of an abstract notion of "beauty," we return not only to Ruskin but, by implication (I will argue thoroughly below), to the imperialist and exclusionary logic of cultural value that gave Ruskin and his contemporaries their social authority as arbiters of taste.

     It is worth noting right away that I am on the defensive here, given that I am certainly just the type of "art professional" Hickey would surely excoriate for my supposed collusion with what he calls (sounding rather like a wizened Republican) the PC "liberal institution" with its conniving seduction of the nonspecialist beholder by a rigid politics of anti-pleasure rhetoric. Hickey’s admonition seems to imply that the call to political responsibility is nothing but a burden for the "common man." Left alone, Hickey argues, this beholder would otherwise inevitably be impressed by the "beauty" of objects–an aesthetic effect that is, in his words, "directly" purveyed to the viewer but at the same time (and contradictorily), all too easily suppressed by evil academicians like myself. Aside from the facts that Hickey himself is an academic, ensconced in the "liberal institution" of the University of Nevada–and that he is the one winning awards from the institutional centers of art criticism and art history (such as the College Art Association), not supposedly "enfranchised" scholars like myself–the most important points to be made definitively against Hickey’s reactionary argument are historical, rather than personal or institutional ones.3

     This paper, then, attempts to critique the notion of "beauty" as it has been mobilized by Hickey and his coterie by returning it to history. I want to dismantle the notion of "beauty" itself (as wielded so authoritatively and naturalized so thoroughly by Hickey and his "mentor" Ruskin) such that, by the end of this paper, you will no longer be seduced by the rhetoric of beauty that has, unfortunately, once again taken on the legitimacy of a closed system of aesthetic and political judgment. First, through Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, I retrace the foundation of modern as well as, apparently, postmodern aesthetics; the remainder of the paper works through a number of images that art history has more or less consensually deemed "beautiful" in order to interrogate the particular exclusions that are at work in any discourse that naturalizes "beauty" as a singular criterion of art judgment and appreciation.

     The tension in the "more or less" serves to signal a series of conceptual gaps I spelunk in order to make their edges and chasms more visible, exposing the contradictions at work in the aesthetic so as to refuse its attempted lack of closure. I hope to convince you that, without its suture effect, the new permutation of beauty discourse (where, in Hickey’s words, beauty is made obvious and true as "the single direct route from the image to the individual"4) can be laid bare for what it is: yet another version of a very old game that operates to privilege a particular group of critics (almost all white men) as having access to the truth. The naturalized discourse of aesthetic judgment ( "every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure") is itself an "institution" that specifically functions to exclude, not only those readers/viewers labeled insensitive (those stale "art professionals" who happen to disagree with Hickey and his colleagues–such as myself) but the very history of the aesthetic’s own politics of exclusion.

     Exclusion is the primary function of aesthetics and the rhetoric of beauty as these have conventionally been wielded, Hickey’s stated empathy with what he calls the "secular" or "disenfranchised" beholder aside. My project here is summed up by Roland Barthes’ statement of goals in Mythologies, his epic study of myth: "I want… to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there."5

     Ink Stains on the Passe-Partout

     In the history of western art, the naked white female body has long performed as the most consistent (if contentious and highly charged) trope of aesthetic beauty. As best-sellers such as Kenneth Clark’s book The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art suggest, it is the female nude that, in the words of Lynda Nead, "articulates fully the alchemic powers of art" to transform through beauty.6 At the same time, as Nead asserts, the female nude operates through the aesthetic as, precisely, a container to enframe and control the threat of unbridled female sexuality.7 The aesthetic, in this light, can be viewed precisely as a strategic mode of discourse that operates to cohere the male subject, always anxious about the perceived power of female sexuality and social access.8 As object safely contained within the rhetoric of representation, "content" of the commodified painterly or sculpted object, the female nude is presumably made docile, an object of exchange between men (artist, patron, viewer). Not only is she made docile as object of heterosexual male desire, the female nude retains her status as "art" rather than "pornography" by maintaining an attachment to signifiers of purity (whiteness) that are racially determined.

      Viewed through the lens of deconstructive philosophy, the aesthetic, as Jacques Derrida has notably remarked, is thus a framing device that aims to link the inside (the subject, the interior of the picture) with the outside (the object, the viewer in the world). The aesthetic is precisely the conceptual structure that enables the traffic in images/ in women called the art market, which itself has traditionally supported the vast and intricate system of privilege that might be reduced to the dualistic circuit that opposes the artist (bound by identification to the viewer and, as we shall see, to "God") to the objects of exchange (women, paintings, slaves). As philosophers from Hegel onward have explored, such oppositional relationships structure not only aesthetics but the philosophical inquiry: lived experience in the Western world is characterized by a partition of subjects into endlessly negotiated dialectics of Master and Slave. Yet, as Derrida points out, the frame is itself both inside and outside: these relationships are chiasmic, intertwining inside and out even as they work as momentary oppositions.

      Through such momentary polarizations, the aesthetic sets itself up as proof of the viewer’s mastery and coherence (as a "self-authenticating dialogue"9 that tautologically confirms the viewer’s "correctness" of opinion regarding the beautiful). The aesthetic works both to contain otherness by reducing the other to beautiful object and to erect the subject of judgment as Master; it does this (via Kant) paradoxically by claiming that the judgment of what is beautiful is both spontaneous and individual, sparked by the "harmony of form in the object" (experienced within the subject), and universal. Kant, famously, insists that the judging person feels completely free as regards the liking he accords the object [and is thus fully disinterested]…. Hence he will talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment were logical… even though [and it is this "even though" that has been elided by dominant models of art critical analysis that borrow from Kant–even though] in fact the judgment is only aesthetic and refers the object’s presentation merely to the subject. He will talk in this way because the logical judgment does resemble a logical judgment inasmuch as we may presuppose it to be valid for everyone…. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality.10

      Kant’s model of aesthetic judgment relies explicitly on the capacity of the beautiful object to inspire pure taste and elevated pleasure in the viewer but, simultaneously, requires that this viewer maintain his integrity by claiming to be disinterested (that is, the beautiful object puts aesthetic judgment [language, analysis] into play while, at the same time, taking its very identity from its absolute difference from the realm of logic and speech11). Aesthetic judgment is both a bridge between inside and out and, through disinterestedness (which sets the judge definitively outside), an inviolable boundary of difference. In proposing to control or master the world of visible objects, the aesthetic points to its own failure: Derrida notes that, "[while] the purely subjective affect [informing aesthetic judgment] is provoked by what is called the beautiful, that which is said to be beautiful [is] outside, in the object and independently of its existence."12

      The aesthetic is an ideology of control that is obviously highly successful in sustaining the law of patriarchy but also fails by its own internal contradictions; while it attempts to solve the age-old philosophical problem of the relationship between self and world, self and other, it can only function as such by setting apart the philosopher/judge. The frame is a passe-partout (which, in French, means both a "pass key" and the matte that sets off the picture inside the frame–a "frame within the frame") and, as Derrida points out, the "internal edges of a passe-partout are often beveled."13 There is always leakage polluting the supposedly disinterested authority of the discourse of beauty (an authority exemplified by Hickey’s repeated insistence that the beautiful work has a simple and "direct" relationship to the viewer–a relationship which, naturally, only he is authorized to describe). That pollution is, as suggested earlier, the stench of ideology: the arbiter’s own psychic investments that encourage him or her to prefer one object over another.

      Hickey, like Kant and Ruskin before him, makes recourse to the seductive claims of common sense in his naturalized and never clearly specified notion of beauty, which he only once attempts to define and then tautologically. Hickey’s definition–"beauty [is] the agency that cause[s] visual pleasure in the beholder"14–thus explicitly parallels (but is far less profound and productively ambiguous than) Kant’s fabulous contortion in the Critique of Judgment: the "feeling of pleasure or displeasure" that the beautiful inspires "denotes nothing in the object, but is a feeling which the Subject has…"15 Thus, for Kant, as for Hickey, beauty is an agency that causes the viewing subject to judge it beautiful (beauty thus causes its own value) while reciprocally confirming the arbiter of beauty as "correct" in his judgment (the viewer who claims an object to be beautiful is thus, inevitably, right).

      Given the role of naked white women in the visual structuration of an ideology of "beauty," it is notable that Hickey chooses Robert Mapplethorpe–the author of images of naked (often black) men engaged in erotic postures and acts–as the Genius of beauty. The question of the cultural value and interest of Mapplethorpe’s work aside, it is worth noting by way of a complaint how convenient it seems to be these days for white male critics to invoke Geniuses who are still white men to secure the authenticity of their aesthetic judgments. The sexualized male bodies of Mapplethorpe’s works notoriously mimic the codes of the fetishization of the female body that is at the base of western aesthetics while, especially in the case of those that are black, rather aggressively dislocating the expected content. Rather than using this fabulous contradiction to interrogate the bases of aesthetic judgment, however, Hickey deploys Mapplethorpe’s work to reiterate the stale and ideologically reprehensible claims of the aesthetic at its worst. There is something insidious at work in Hickey’s claim that Mapplethorpe (whom he rather grotesquely insists on calling "Robert") produces images that are dangerous because of their "direct enfranchisement of the secular beholder," and their "Baroque vernacular of beauty that predated and, clearly, outperformed the puritanical canon of visual appeal espoused by the therapeutic institution."16

      It is the "clearly" of Hickey’s text that, in fact, alerts us to the fact that nothing is clear here. The edges of the passe-partout are beveled–and stained with ink or some other spotty fluid. Were the "Baroque vernacular of beauty" Hickey invokes so obviously triumphant, why would Hickey need to mount such an impassioned defense? It is no accident that Hickey claims Mapplethorpe’s works to have a "direct appeal to the beholder" at the very moment he is so vehemently manufacturing a particular set of meanings for Mapplethorpe’s work.17 This is the gesture of "self-authentication," based entirely on circular reasoning, that Derrida excavates at the base of Kant’s aesthetic. This is the self-authorization that has for so long conspired to support the exclusionary logic and institutions of aesthetic judgment, the most obvious of which is not academic art history per se but art criticism (it is the role of art critic that Hickey simultaneously holds and disavows in his self-staging in opposition to the supposed "liberal institutions" of artspeak).

      At this point, I please myself (and no doubt my audience) by leaving Dave Hickey almost entirely behind, with only a few references here and there to position his arguments in relation to alternative objects as a way of unhinging his–and Ruskin’s, and Kant’s, ad infinitum–assumptions. I want to denaturalize the notion of beauty in relation, specifically, to the very politics of gendered and racialized identities that Hickey deems beneath his lofty and "disinterested" consideration (even while he gets mileage out of the frisson of their transgression). This analysis, which is meant to highlight exactly what is at stake in the revival of "beauty" by Hickey and his cohorts will pivot around images of naked women that have served as focal points for so-called aesthetic discussions about the meaning of beauty or, otherwise stated, as magnets for what feminists have perhaps over-simplistically called the "male gaze" of interpretive desire. It is, in my view, by excavating the psychic and social structures of desire at work in such images that we can best interrogate what (or whose) interests are served by the rhetoric of beauty.

     God or Goddess?: Boucher’s Pompadour/ Pompadour’s Boucher

      In François Boucher’s elaborate portraits of the extremely powerful Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, the last great Bourbon king of the French monarchy, this extraordinary female intellectual is enframed by an aestheticizing atmosphere of fleshy display.18 For example, in the 1751 Toilette of Venus this "Venus," a spitting image of Pompadour, is depicted as a celestial (yet domesticated) goddess, surrounded by plump pink cupids, typically Rococo swathes of rich silk taffeta, jewels, and exotic gewgaws.19 Here is a "goddess" (the goddess of love, no less) laid low as paramour, a patroness of the arts sympathetically rendered as willfully open flesh offered for the delectation of Royal viewing pleasure: commissioned by Pompadour herself, the painting hung in the salle-de-bain at the Château de Bellevue, favorite trysting place for the King and his mistress.20

      However, and paradoxically, within the discourse of beauty, this image stands as both paradigm and antithesis: it both sums up the way in which white women’s bodies have historically been produced within the rhetoric of western painting as "beautiful" objects of male desire and exemplifies that which Kantian aesthetics specifically labors to expel. Madame de Pompadour as Venus instantiates the contradictory logic at the base of the aesthetic. First of all, for Kant, disinterestedness requires precisely the removal of all sensual affect: the arbiter must eradicate corporeal enjoyment in his appreciation of true beauty. This anxiety about corporeal desire is, of course, at odds with the insistent depiction of naked women (sites to arouse corporeal desire) in the history of western art. Pompadour/Venus–as paradigm of the female nude–works to contain just the uncontrollable erotic frisson that she invokes.21

      Pompadour’s Bouchers (which are, reciprocally, Boucher’s Pompadours) are doubly charged. Not only do they invoke what they are meant to contain, such images also signified for Revolutionary France and beyond the reprehensible corruption (otherwise viewed as feminization) of the ancien régime.22 The fluffy, Rococo goddess is, above all, excessively sexual and embraced by an environment of hyper-ornamentality. She threatens to destroy Kant’s argument that art, by definition, excludes decoration and artifice: art, Kant writes, "must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature."23 While being raised to the level of "goddess of love," Pompadour is also arguably disempowered as beautiful object; at the same time, as feminist Eunice Lipton has pointed out, she is also deified and given devastating potency through the very sexual power that Kant’s aesthetics labors to contain.24 It was, in fact, precisely such excesses of the Rococo exemplified by Boucher’s flamboyant deployment of color, atmosphere, and symbolism to heighten the erotic appeal (the impure aesthetic pleasure?) of his object which inspired Kant, writing just a few decades later, in his attempt to expel artifice (feminizing display) from the realm of the aesthetic.

      Pompadour’s Boucher and Boucher’s Pompadour are thus both at the center of the discourse of beauty (by 1765 Boucher was named premier peintre du roi) and definitively shut out of its rigorous Kantian borders (Boucher and powerful women such as Pompadour were major targets of the Enlightenment philosophes in their articulation of new aesthetic and social standards). By the 1760s, the reaction against Boucher had been fully articulated by Kant’s Enlightenment colleague, Denis Diderot, who wrote scathingly of Boucher’s compositions as making "an unbearable racket for the eyes…" Boucher, continued Diderot, "is showing us the prettiest marionettes in the world…"25 In one swipe, Diderot thus attempts to extinguish both the feminized aesthetic of Boucher (which is "pretty" rather than "beautiful") and the female power that lay behind it (with Pompadour having been Boucher’s most supportive and prominent patron). Once again, we see a deep anxiety regarding that which can’t be controlled at the base of the critic’s naturalized claim of judgment.

      Such naturalizing claims of value function to position the critic in identification with the artist who is, in turn, conflated with God. Thus, through informed and "disinterested" aesthetic judgment, the critic intuits the meaning and value of the work by discerning the beauty that emanates forth from its contours (as presumably placed there by the divinely inspired artist).26 This structure of circular identifications, which legitimates artist and interpreter in one gesture by aligning both with a transcendent origin, is what Derrida aptly terms the "divine teleology" of the aesthetic, writing "the concept of art is … constructed with… a guarantee in view. It is there to raise man up, that is, always, to erect a man-god, to avoid contamination from ‘below’…"27 In our case, the contamination is signalled by a dangerous feminine sexual cum political power (linked, class-wise, to the increasingly questioned privileges of the aristocracy); while the rococo is deemed reactionary by Diderot, it can be viewed at the same time as a radical freeing of otherwise enframed and forbidden sexual power.

      Given this divine teleology, it is worth returning to Ruskin who in the 1849 essay states that "God has stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man’s nature to love."28 It is "clear," as Hickey would claim for his judgment of Mapplethorpe, that it is ultimately God who secures such claims of beauty. Only God can act as origin and end of beauty, incontrovertible enough to stop the seepage that pollutes the ostensibly closed, otherwise "pure" system of aesthetic judgment (staining the passe-partout). In fact, as noted, the history of aesthetics as it developed in the work of Kant and others in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, is a story about one of the last covertly theological attempts to bridge the seemingly unsurpassable chasm between "man" and "nature," inside and outside, subject and object. Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment proposed precisely to bridge this gap by defining a mode of experiencing beauty that would leap the abyss between the natural, the source of all that is beautiful, and the human-made.29

      By proposing a "divine teleology," where the figure of the Genius secures a "divine agency in art" the meaning of which can only be determined by the disinterested critic (who, by extension, claims his own "divine agency" as judge), the aesthetic reconfirms a system of privilege that can only be called patriarchal (with all of the colonialist, sexist, and heterosexist assumptions it sustains).30 The artist / critic circuit–that divine teleology–is given authority by reference to an originary genius, God. It is as goddess that Pompadour threatens to disrupt this naturalized circuit of authority–both because of the uncontainability of the erotic pleasure she promises and because of the anxiety invoked by the social and economic power that enabled her to sponsor a painter such as Boucher. Thus, per Diderot’s analysis, Pompadour/Boucher must be shut down. Diderot derides Boucher’s paintings (and Pompadour’s body?) as a grotesque "invitation to pleasure." The heatedness of Diderot’s denouncement alerts us to the fact that this pleasure is dangerous because it is flamboyantly not "disinterested" or wholesome.

      It is of great interest, then, that the very naked white women’s bodies that the aesthetic deploys to defuse the threat of femininity are the vehicles through which this threat is publicly extended and proclaimed. At the same time, the aesthetic is successful enough in its framing exercise such that white women are, to be sure, not ruling the world–nor are "academic feminists," Hickey’s anxieties aside. As Peggy Phelan has pointed out in her brilliant critique of the common faith in theories of identity on the power of visibility, "If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture."31 The very ambivalence that destructures the aesthetic at its core also points to the slipperiness of meaning and value in relation to all images, not the least those assumed to be "beautiful" by one critic or another.

      At this point, it is certainly worth thinking about other works that might be seen as performing an equally disgusting invitation to forbidden pleasures. In this way, I would like to suggest that there are other "almost-naked" or even fully clothed women whose bodies disrupt the aesthetic from within–even more dramatically than that ambiguous figure of the white female nude.

           "Olympia’s Maid" and Renée Cox’s Phallus

  Edouard Manet’s Olympia, the scandal of Paris’s 1865 salon, holds a crucial–because highly conflicted–place in the trajectory defining the codification of the aesthetic in western thought. The painting, conflated with its nude, was widely condemned by the critical apparatus at the time. Olympia, wrote one critic, is "a sort of female gorilla, a grotesque in India rubber outlined in black [who]… apes on a bed, in a state of complete nudity, the horizontal attitude of Titian’s Venus [of Urbino, 1538]."32 Manet, as art historian T.J. Clark has argued, travestied conceptions of the beautiful (specifically through its explicit reference to Titian’s Renaissance "masterpiece") such that critics became almost hysterical, scarcely veiling their anxiety in a sarcastic rhetoric of exaggerated disgust (not only is Olympia a "rubber gorilla," she is dirty, corpse-like, decrepit, stupid, and "of a perfect ugliness").33

  Olympia’s radical unhinging of accepted conventions of "beauty"–as summed up by contrast with Alexandre Cabanal’s Venus, which had been effusively praised as the masterpiece of the 1863 salon–resulted in feverish attempts to close her down . Not only is the painting personified as Olympia, the whore, the latter is outrageously insulted, the weighty oak door in the edifice of proper aesthetic expression slammed in her face by the guardians of propriety (the critic is thus the butler hovering in the frame of the doorway, ostensibly protecting his "master" upstairs). Olympia must be kept out–or en-framed–at all costs, lest the resistance signaled by her rubbery flesh and defiant gaze destroy the pretension of (erotic) disinterestedness held forth by the aesthetic.

  And yet, there is something even more disturbing here. Leaving Boucher’s boudoir-encased fluffy pink nudes behind, by the early to mid-nineteenth century French painters highlighted the delectable whiteness of their almost naked women by posing them against dark bodies. As Lorraine O’Grady has so importantly asked in this regard, what about "Olympia’s Maid"? Once brought back into the frame, as it were, the maid points to the fact that it is not, strictly speaking, Olympia who is the greatest threat to the aesthetic, but the maid herself; surely the tendency to label Olympia a "gorilla" is a displacement of racial anxieties generated by the maid. As O’Grady notes, the maid (painted after a professional model named Laura) is the "chaos that must be excised [from the picture], and it is her excision that stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body, for the ‘femininity’ of the white female body is ensured by assigning the not-white to a chaos safely removed from sight."34 While Olympia is clearly a challenge to the unbridled privilege of sexual ownership claimed by the upper-class European white male viewer, the chaos signified by the maid exceeds that proposed by Olympia to such a degree that the maid cannot even be mentioned in critical reviews.

  Olympia’s maid thus throws into relief not only the anxious misogyny at the base of the aesthetic but its classist and racist dimensions. J.A.D. Ingres’s 1840 painting Odalisque with Slave allows a further elaboration of these dimensions, which were linked to Europe’s colonial exploits abroad. Thus, in the Ingres painting a multiple range of racial desirability serves to sustain the conflicted logic of the aesthetic and thereby labors to secure the viewer in his sexual, racial, class, and national superiority. The apparently "white" woman in the foreground is clearly thrown forth as the primary object of sexual desire, her blank genital region coyly offered up through a diaphanous veil of chiffon, her arms thrown back in seeming ecstasy. At the same time, she must not, cannot "really" be white in the European sense since Ingres clearly shows us a middle-eastern or North African harem (the two vastly different cultures being virtually interchangeable in French painting from this period35). Yet she is assigned symbolic whiteness by contrast with her harem mates–a somewhat darker skinned female musician, taut reddish nipple peeking out from green silk robe, and a eunuch servant whose black and emasculated body recedes into the depths of the painting’s rich, exaggeratedly "Oriental" interior. (And one might ask, which figure, musician or eunuch, is the "Slave" of the title?)

  Notably, too, as the skin gets darker, it is more fully covered–to the point where the servant’s body (except for hands and face) is entirely draped in fabric: molded into a phallic sheath as if to palliate the (castration) anxiety that the idea of the eunuch produces in the European masculine imagination. The white European male viewer is offered a cornucopia of exotic/erotic delights, with the threat of racial otherness defused either by its transformation into whiteness or its veiling and class subordination (the covered eunuch, the objectified musician gazing upwards as if in an opium-induced stupor). Like Olympia’s maid, the olive-skinned musician and reserved black servant function to highlight the available difference and, by comparison, supposed "purity," of the seemingly white odalisque: fleshy, open, penetrable, erotic. The harem, as contrived through the nineteenth-century French male imaginary, functions as the perfect site of uninhibited desire (after all, European men viewed harems as equivalents to bordellos).

  As Malek Alloula has written, "[t]he phantasmatic value of the harem is a function of this presumed absence of limitation to a sexual pleasure lived in the mode of frenzy…." He adds that it is in the nature of pleasure "to scrutinize its object detail by detail, to take possession of it in both a total and a fragmented fashion. It is an intoxication, a loss of oneself in the other through sight."36 While the white European male produces an "intoxication" in such images, proposing a "loss" of the white male subject in the "other through sight," he also, as we have discussed, defuses the threat posed by such an intoxication through the hierarchical regimentation of bodies in space that we recognize as aesthetic composition (in the major survey book on nineteenth-century art, Robert Rosenblum thus rhapsodizes that, "[a]s rigorous as his master David in his ability to interlock a multitude of rectilinear volumes and surfaces, Ingres evokes here a feminine ambiance of voluptuous relaxation and engulfing sensuousness"37). Even as Ingres exposes and unveils his erotic object(s) he contains her/them through rigid codes of aesthetic display–codes that specifically reiterate differences of class, nation, and race as they function both to incite desire and to allay psycho-sexual, cultural anxieties about these very differences.

  Yo Mama!: Who’s Deciding Now?

  Through this rather extended analysis of paintings by Boucher, Manet, and Ingres I hope to have persuaded my audience that anxieties regarding gender are not by any means the only terrors motivating the aesthetic’s logic of enframing (either in terms of the production or reception of works of art). In concluding, I present a 1993 life-sized photographic self-portrait by the young artist Renée Cox. Entitled Yo Mama, this stunning image, which exemplifies the efforts on the part of many young women artists working today once again to dislocate and discredit claims for the neutrality of "beauty" as a label of aesthetic judgment, can be seen as a definitive "fuck you" to the still potent institutional force of beauty discourse.

  Hickey might well excoriate such work–and certainly my reading of it–as motivated by the desire to be "politically correct"; by such a gesture, he would legitimate his own preferences as inherent rather than ideologically motivated. I would like to stress here again that such rhetoric merely veils privilege: Hickey privileges Mapplethorpe’s works for their "enfranchise[ment] of the non-canonical beholder," with no consideration of who this beholder might be and under what circumstances she or he would become "enfranchised" through an encounter with an image of, for example, a picture of a young girl with her legs spread or two men fist-fucking.

  Too, Hickey’s argument shows a complete and surely strategic lack of any element of self-consciousness that might take into account why he in particular finds "Robert’s" works so obviously and directly to convey such jouissance.

  Like Kant’s transcendental subject, Hickey must, in the words of Susan Buck-Morss, "purge… himself of the senses which endanger autonomy not only because they unavoidably entangle him in the world, but, specifically, because they make him passive… instead of active…, susceptible, like ‘Oriental voluptuaries,’ to sympathy and tears."38 Self-consciousness would eliminate Hickey’s naturalized claim to critical authority–placing him, as it were, in the harem or conspiring with Mapplethorpe in the latter’s eroticization of black male bodies; an admittance of his own erotic interpretive investments–his desire to penetrate the mysteries of "Robert"’s works–would expose what is at stake in his attempt to establish his view as inexorably correct.

  Returning to Cox, let me propose an alternative way to interpret visual art works that we find compelling, politically astute, entertaining, or, for that matter, "beautiful" (whatever that may mean). Let me project my own partiality for Cox–her body (I want it for my own, to be it as well as, perhaps, but this is deeply repressed, to possess it), and her mind (I want to mimic what I perceive as her conceptual brilliance and ironic sense of humor). I want to align myself definitively with Cox’s strength of mind and body, as I perceive these being expressed in this taut body-image of strong naked woman who is both buffed, sexualized object and maternal subject. In my sometimes pain at being white, with the negative responsibilities this entails in western patriarchy, and experiencing the inevitable privilege that my "visible" bodily appearance assigns me in this culture, I want to be this someone else. This is an empassioned response to Hickey’s dismissal of PC. I’ve always attempted to incorporate a sense of my own responsibility within my judging subjectivity rather than projecting it outward into claims for authenticity and if you want to call this "PC," well, fine. (As Jennifer Faist recently argued, beauty is Hickey’s "camouflage to lobby for his own ethical and political agendas."39) My reading can only be "authentic" but only in relation to myself: it is fully contingent but also, I hope, informed and compelling at least for some.

  I am here, I judge and give meaning–on the basis of what my particular investments are, on the basis of an argument I am trying to make. I am cognizant that I thereby participate in the circuit of meaning ascribed to the author-subject Renée Cox. If I am persuasive, I may entice some of you to identify with the positions I outline here (and to agree with my admiration for the "beauty," power, and political efficacy of Cox’s fantastic image). If I am not, you may dislike the picture and even continue to believe in the immutable authenticity of Dave Hickey’s judgments. Either way, it behooves all of us to recognize and to remind you all that beauty–there’s no doubt about it–is in the eye of the beholder.

____

1.This apt phrase, which sums up the attitude authorizing aesthetics, was stated by John Ruskin in "The Lamp of Beauty," The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), reprinted in The Lamp of Beauty: Writings on Art by John Ruskin, ed. Joan Evans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press; and Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1959/1980), p.197.

2. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art issues. Press, 1993), on Ruskin, in the unpaginated "Acknowledgments," on "art professionals," p.13. I am focusing in this essay only on this relatively early publication, which promotes this idea of "beauty" in a manner that has unfortunately been internationally influential, especially among artists. I am not interested in Hickey’s work as a whole or in the trajectory of his thought.

3. That is, I leave aside for now the stench of rotting old-world money emanating from the cabal of narrow-/like-minded individuals hanging on Hickey’s coattails and making a killing off the economic surplus inevitably generated by his conception of "beauty."

4. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, p.20.

5. Roland Barthes, "Preface" to Mythologies (1957), tr. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p.11.

6. Kenneth Clark’s book was originally published in 1956, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London: John Murray, 1956), and has since been reprinted in numerous subsequent editions. See Lynda Nead The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), p.12—14.

7. She states, categorically, "one of the principal goals of the female nude has been the containment aned regulation of the female sexual body," The Female Nude, p.6.

8. I am leaving the castration complex (the unconscious level of this) aside for this analysis, but one could easily analyze this problematic from the point of view of castration anxiety.

9. D.N. Rodowick, "Impure Mimesis, or the Ends of the Aesthetic," Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge, 1994), p.111.

10. Immanual Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), tr. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986), p.54; my emphasis.

11. This is Rodowick’s reading of Derrida in "Impure Mimesis."

12. Derrida, Truth in Painting, tr. Ian McLeod and Geoff Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p.47.

13. Derrida, Truth in Painting, p.13.

14. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, p.11.

15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p.42. This translation is modified according to the 1978 edition, translation by James Creed Meredith (Oxford University Press).

16. Hickey, The Invisible Dragon, 21, p.22.

17. Ibid., p.24.

18. It is debatable whether the numerous nudes commissioned from Boucher by Pompadour are actually portraits of her. The faces of the nudes are typically abstracted and idealized (as are, in fact, the faces in the official portraits of Pompadour); furthermore, Boucher had a favorite model, "Mlle. O’Murphy," for some of his erotic nude portraits (such as Odalisque, also titled Mlle. O’Murphy, 1743, at the Louvre). However, I think it is justifiable to analyze them as portraits to the extent that they were clearly used as self-reference points for their patroness, who had them hung throughout the palace where she held her romantic trysts with the King. This is especially justifiable in the case of the Toilette of Venus, since Pompadour had just played the role of Venus in a play by the same name as the painting, making the element of self-identification strong. See the exhibition catalogue François Boucher 1703—1770, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986).

19. With the incongruous addition of a Grecian urn, marking the beginning of the rage for all things Greek among European cultures at this time. I am very grateful to Steven Ostrow for his insights into these portraits and allegories.

20. The painting hung as a pendant with the Bath of Venus. See François Boucher… , p.256.

21. Nead explores a similar dynamic in The Female Nude but analyzes the framing apparatus of the aesthetic in terms of the opposition of "art" and "obscenity." My analysis sees a more subtle and mutually sustaining series of terms at work as exemplified in the conflicted reception of Boucher’s work–as both high art, paradigmatic of beauty, and as debased, frivolous, kitsch against which Enlightenment philosophers such as Diderot and Kant reacted.

22. Thomas Crow notes that Pompadour’s name "is one of the most familiar in the cultural history of the period, standing itself for Rococo elaboration and excess." Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p.110. This links up to the way in which images of Marie Antoinette were, thirty years later, also highly coded to align her with the corruption of Rococo culture and the depravity of the aristocracy, as viewed by revolutionary culture.

23. Kant, cited by Rodowick, "Impure Mimesis," p.105.

24. See Eunice Lipton’s essay "Women, Pleasure and Painting (e.g., Boucher)," Genders 7 (Spring 1990), p.69—86.

25. Cited by Michael Fried in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p.41. Fried discusses Boucher’s reputation at some length and this discussion is indebted to his research. That Fried uses Boucher’s reception to confirm the antithesis between absorptive painting (which he, along with Diderot, privileges) and a debased theatricality cannot be a matter of critique here, though I have elsewhere critically examined these terms as Fried plays them out in relation to contemporary art. See my essay in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London and New York: Routledge Press, forthcoming).

26. See Donald Preziosi’s deep analysis of this dynamic in Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

27. Derrida, "Economimesis," tr. R. Klein, Diacritics II, n. 2 (Summer 1981), p.9, p.5; my emphasis on "erect."

28. Ruskin, The Lamp of Beauty, p.196.

29. It was Hegel, following the ideas of Winckelmann, who changed the emphasis of the aesthetic by arguing that the Ideal could be found not in nature, with its vastness and imperfections, but in the creations of humankind. The Ideal is precisely that which bridges nature and "man" by taking that which is the most superior in nature but combining these elements to create a greater beauty. See Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art (1835), tr. F.P.B. Osmaston (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1920), especially "The Ideal as Such."

30. See Rodowic’s thorough discussion of this aspect of Derrida’s argument in "Impure Mimesis," p.105.

31. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), p.10.

32. Amédée Cantaloube, writing in Le Grand Journal in 1865; cited by T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton U. Press, 1984), p.94.

33. All cited by Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, p.96—98.

34. Lorraine O’Grady, "Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," in New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action, ed. Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer, and Arlene Raven (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p.153.

35. Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson call the scene "Islamic" in 19th-Century Art (New York: Abrams, 1984), p.149.

36. Malek Alloulla, The Colonial Harem, tr. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p.49.

37. In Rosenblum and Janson, 19th-Century Art, p.150.

38. Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October (Fall 1992), p.9; she is citing Kant with "Oriental voluptuaries."

39. Jennifer Faist, "Wrapping for the Rhetoric: Dave Hickey and Beauty in Art," Coagula 26 (March, 1997).

___

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This paper was originally written for the local Society of Photographic Education (SPE) conference organized by Ken Gonzales-Day, to whom I am very grateful for the opportunity to present it publicly.

I would also like to cite two quotations that conditioned my thinking about this topic:

Beauty is one of those great mysteries of nature, whose influence we all see and feel; but a general, distinct idea of its essential must be classed among the truths yet undiscovered. If this idea were geometrically clear, men would not differ in their opinions upon the beautiful, and it would be easy to prove what true beauty is.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann,1764*

…there can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful…**
Immanuel Kant,1790

While Immanual Kant, in particular, has gotten a bad rap (due primarily to the adoption and simplification of his theories of aesthetics by Clement Greenberg), both Kant and his contemporary, Winckelmann, still have a great deal to teach us about the question of the beautiful.

---------------------------------------------------

*Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, 1764. Reprinted in Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology (London: Phaidon, 1995), p.75.

**Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1986), p.59.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This edition of "Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics" by Amelia Jones incorporates the author's corrections to the version printed in X-Tra, Vol.2, No.3. The essay is complete: the endnotes have been re-numbered to reflect changes in the formatting for the web.

 

The avant - grade at the end of the century

 

http://www.bard.edu/graduate/mfa/summer/readings/documents/ReturnoftheRealExcerptPart2.pdf

 

Source: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/seeing-queerly/

Image: aul Cadmus: What I Believe, 1947-48, egg tempera on pressed wood panel, 16 1/4 by 27 inches. McNay Art Museum, San Antonio. © Jon F. Anderson, Estate of Paul Cadmus/ licensed by VAGA, New York.

Text: Seeing Queerly: By Faye Hirsch Published 2/4/11 in  Art In America

Seeing Queerly

By Faye Hirsch

Washington When I visited the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., to see “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” in early December, David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly (1987) had already been removed [see A.i.A., Jan. ’11 and Homepage, this issue]. Across the country, institutions had begun screening the video, and the Association of Art Museum Directors had issued an official statement condemning the Smithsonian’s decision. As I am writing, protests and panels proceed apace (a discussion is scheduled for Jan. 29 at the NPG itself), and the Canadian-born artist AA Bronson is militating, so far unsuccessfully, for the removal from the exhibition of his disquieting Felix, June 4, 1994, a mural-size photograph that depicts his lover and collaborator in the collective General Idea, Felix Pardo, gaunt and open-eyed, just deceased from HIV/AIDS. Unlike A Fire in My Belly, which vanished from the show without a trace (none of the videos in the exhibition are included in the catalogue, so we have no record there, either), the removal of Bronson’s piece, leaving a blank wall, would present an explicit sign of the controversy that has come, regrettably, to eclipse the show itself.

“Hide/Seek” had seemed to have escaped what its co-curator Jonathan D. Katz calls a 21-year-long “blacklist” of gay-themed exhibitions at U.S. government-funded institutions, following the notorious cancellation of the Corcoran’s Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition during the (first) Culture War, in 1989. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and David C. Ward, historian at the National Portrait Gallery, have mounted a carefully researched, in places ingeniously selected, exhibition. On view are 104 works (A Fire in My Belly made the count 105, at least for one month)—drawings, paintings, photographs and videos—dating mainly to the 20th century. Many of them are little known or rarely seen, tucked away in private collections or belonging to small regional or university museums.

“Hide/Seek” comes at a time of unprecedented inroads into social equality for LGBT persons (though also, as the winter “Intelligence Report” by the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals, during a period when hate-crime violence against gays is on the rise). Gay rights as an issue crosses the political divide, as was demonstrated by the recent repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and several gay marriage cases that are steadily making their way to the Supreme Court. The appearance of “Hide/Seek” at this relatively staid institution in the nation’s capital is at the very least a symptom of changing attitudes. Moreover, the show’s rather conservative roster of establishment artists, from Thomas Eakins, Grant Wood and Marsden Hartley to Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Georgia O’Keeffe, gives it a further air of legitimacy. This exhibition was designed to outrage no one.

In his excellent if perhaps overly digressive catalogue essay, Katz makes a carefully reasoned argument that portraiture, even heavily coded, is a genre well suited to revealing gay life before Stonewall (1969): Portraiture plays a key role in understanding sexual difference ina world not yet divided between homosexuals and heterosexuals, a world where the concept of “having a sexuality” did not yet exist. It helps us answer not only the question of what same-sex difference signified socially and how it was marked but also, by implication, how critical an aspect of character it was deemed to be in the accurate portrayal of a sitter.

Katz’s definition of the genre is elastic, however. While the show includes fully identifiable portraits by the likes of Carl van Vechten and Robert Mapplethorpe, there are also some more oblique choices: Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, one of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy piles memorializing friends lost to AIDS; photographs of faceless, anonymous figures by Yayoi Kusama (a “gay wedding” before gay marriage existed) and Tee Corinne (an erotic tableau); and abstractions by O’Keeffe and Hartley. Some of these are truly superb, like the two Hartleys: Painting No. 47, Berlin (1914-15), a “portrait” of a slain World War I German officer, Karl von Freyburg, one of Hartley’s unrequited loves, and the haunting Eight Bells Folly, his homage to Hart Crane, who killed himself in 1932, the year before Hartley painted it.

 Katz argues convincingly for reading issues of sexuality into works that might not, at first sight, appear to be “gay,” given the covertness of sexual identity during most of the period covered. By this line of reasoning, the old arguments about Thomas Eakins’s proclivities do not prevent us from reading queerness into his paintings. “How can we discuss Eakins’s sexuality in advance of the very words that convey it?” asks Katz, reasonably. The brightly lit body of a young boxer in Salutat (1898) is pretty frankly erotic, his rippling back muscles and firm buttocks scrutinized by the crowd of men as he enters the arena. Speculation has abounded for years about Eakins, along with many of the artists on view here, but pursuing that line of inquiry is not the curators’ aim. Rather, it is the subtle codes or not-so-subtle eroticism embedded in the works themselves that is of interest. “The wistful youth set against the homoerotic scenes in the background suggests the tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America” (as opposed to gravitating to urban centers), reads the entry on a painting of a prim, somewhat melancholic young fellow in a river landscape by Grant Wood (Arnold Comes of Age, 1930); more blandly, about a painting of a virile, naked blond youth in a field by, of all people, Andrew Wyeth, the entry reads “[the artist] imbues his subject with an undeniably homo-erotic, as well as heterosexual, appeal” (The Clearing, 1979). For better and worse, such an approach liberates researchers from the restraints imposed by scant—even nonexistent—biographical evidence.

There are some real coups. Jasper Johns assented to the inclusion of Souvenir (1964) from his own collection, a piece that is on long-term loan to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is hung in proximity to several works by Rauschenberg, including a small, rare self-portrait collage from 1965. Thus, in effect, the show is a coming out of sorts for the circumspect Johns, who was, for a time, Rauschenberg’s lover. On the other hand, the curators scared up an extremely rare figurative painting from the late 1940s by Agnes Martin, who did her best to destroy all of her pre-abstract work. It depicts a naked young woman whose identity—self-portrait or lover—is unknown. Martin may have lived as a lesbian, but this fact was not manifested at all in the work we know best—and perhaps not in this one, either. It was the mere biographical fact of her sexuality that seemed the pretext for the inclusion of the painting.

There are plenty of open, uncloseted images in the show, some depicting figures who appear in more than one work by more than one artist. Who can resist Larry Rivers’s famous life-size, lusty portrait (1954) of his sometime lover Frank O’Hara posing naked except for his boots? O’Hara makes other appearances—in a side-view portrait (1960) by Alice Neel that exaggerates his beaked nose; and in an amusing diptych, Poets (Clothed) Poets (Naked), 1964, by Wynn Chamberlain, depicting four poets of the New York School—O’Hara, Joe Brainard, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima—posing on a bench against Albersian nested rectangles. On one side they are subdued, clothed in suits, and on the other nude, grinning broadly. Such recurrences give us insights into entire milieux.

For all the show’s discreetness, one can’t help, in places, wondering over the censors’ hysteria about a few seconds in Wojnarowicz’s video, or their condemnation of a rather mundane 1997 photograph by Annie Leibovitz of Ellen DeGeneres clowning in whiteface. They don’t like it that she’s cupping her breasts—actually, she’s wearing a fairly successfully concealing bra; the men’s underwear peeping out below seem to entirely escape their notice. By comparison, a painting by Paul Cadmus from 1947-48, What I Believe, based on a 1938 essay by E.M. Forster, is downright outrageous, though it requires precisely what the show’s opponents did not give it: more than an instant of attention. At the center of Cadmus’s Rubensian allegory is a naked couple, man and woman, surrounded by a landscape symbolizing the forces of good and evil. To the viewer’s right, ever the domain of evil in Western art, are vignettes of war and heterosexual life—all ugly groping and squealing babies—while to the left, the realm of the blessed, a homosexual paradise luxuriantly unfolds. Cadmus had his own share of censors in his lifetime, but my guess is that House Speaker John Boehner—one of the most strident critics of the show—will likely not join their posthumous ranks.

It comes as no surprise that there are fewer entries by women than men, since much of the work was made in an era when there were fewer women artists in general. Moreover, in the early days, a doubly erased identity—woman artist and lesbian—made for a very low profile to be sure. Nonetheless, among the strongest works on view are paintings by Romaine Brooks (1874-1970) conveying the cool, fashionable elegance of lesbian expatriates in Paris between the wars. I do not understand why, however, there is no painting by Nicole Eisenman among the few post-AIDS works on view in the last section, titled Postmodernism. Eisenman has often portrayed herself and friends, since the start of her career in the mid-’90s, in a style that would have resonated very effectively with that of Brooks.

Indeed, beginning in the 1990s and continuing today, there has been an efflorescence of high-spirited, cutting-edge art by lesbians dealing with gender identity. You wouldn’t know it from this show. The curators chose, for example, a 2003 portrait by the hipster scene celebrity photographer Cass Bird of an ambiguously gendered adolescent, when Collier Schorr, who has been treating the same subject matter for nearly 20 years, has been so much more influential among artists. Catherine Opie’s Being and Having (1991), showing tattooed young women masquerading in fake facial hair, is present. Yet one instead longs for her portraits of lesbian family life, given the pressing issue of gay marriage.

Ward told me in a conversation that they did not wish to end on the sad note of AIDS, and that is understandable. All the more reason, then, to have included maquettes or drawings for Patricia Cronin’s memorial of herself and her partner, the artist Deborah Kass, embracing in bed, nude and forever young, which was unveiled at Woodlawn National Cemetery in the Bronx in 2002. (Both artists are alive and well.) Cronin’s 3-ton monument is remarkable, a very public affirmation of lesbianism and, in addition, a joyous alternative to the sober images of death that saturated the art world during the AIDS crisis and are very well represented here. It should have been in this show.

Perhaps the only answer is a sequel—at a major museum, again, one hopes—focusing on the new queer identity in contemporary art, which is much less bound to stereotypes of gayness, and ever more heterogeneous and unpredictable in its manifestations. Until then, “Hide/Seek” offers a good historical survey with its own subtle twists. Hopefully the curators will have proved sufficiently clever to foil any further efforts by today’s culture warriors to censor a timely show.

Currently On View “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., through Feb. 13.

“Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” is accompanied by a 295-page catalogue by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward.