Tension as interest.

One thing that comes up a lot in critiques and in the instruction that my professors give is the idea that a work has to have some sort of tension to hold the viewer's interest. Much of the time, we're talking about conceptual interest -- being able to create a contradiction that the viewer is forced to process and resolve. This tension exists aesthetically as well, which Eli Siegel posits in his 1955 essay, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? The gist of the piece is simply that all good artwork manages to bring together two ends of a spectrum, e.g. simplicity and complexity, light and dark, depth and surface, energy and repose, etc...

This all makes sense to me. This school and the work that I've seen and the essays I've read have convinced me that this "tension" idea is true and valuable. The thing that concerns me, though is that Siegel has the guts to call this making one of opposites "beauty." It's a really daring claim. After all, isn't there some difference between interest and beauty? (I'm pretty sure that Kant addresses this difference directly, but I'm still working my way through the first few pages of the Critique.) Moreover, is beauty really all that bound up with good artwork as he makes it seem?

First things first; what is the difference between beauty and visual interest? I'm sort of afraid to make a real distinction, in that I might have to claim that beauty has some sort of ideal and I would have to start using a capital "B". I'm not yet ready to make that claim. But! Surely there is something more to beauty than the ability to make me interested in (curious of? frustrated by?) a work of art. No doubt, beauty has that same magnetic quality, but I think that beauty is something much more specific.

Even if Siegel is liberal in his use of the word, he is not necessarily wrong about tension (or the resolution of tension) and its relation to beauty. Is the ability to be two things at once the secret to making beautiful, transcendent things? I feel very conflicted in this. As I mentioned in my previous post, beauty most often feels like an illusive, thoughtless, slithering thing that comes only when we forget about everything else. This description seems to contradict the idea of tension completely. Tension, as I understand it, requires a consciousness of two or more independent parts. The first description makes beauty into something easy and restful, something to be soaked up when it is found. The second is a beauty that requires much of us; we have to engage in the push and pull that the tension creates -- the more we work, the more beauty we see.

I don't feel like I can answer these questions now.. there is entirely too much to consider. What is it that makes me want to look at a Rothko?

Kierstin