I've spent that past year or so developing for myself (and pondering the legitimacy of) the idea that beauty has little or no relevance to art-making; rather, art-making should be about changing the way we think about art. Admittedly, much of this belief has come from slightly obsessing over the writings of Joseph Kosuth, particularly his essay entitled Art After Philosophy. While I understand that the majority of the Conceptualists' motivation came from a frustration with the emphasis on formalism that existed in the mid-twentieth century, I wonder about when art actually became about ideas at all. While Kosuth claims that Duchamp's Fountain really got the ball rolling, there is reason to believe that there was a more fundamental change that occurred much earlier.

Dave Hickey's book, The Invisible Dragon consists of of four essays about beauty's place in art history. The third chapter, Prom Night in the Flatland: On the Gender of Works of Art, focuses on the difference between Renaissance and Baroque painting; a change from feminine to masculine. Hickey's main argument is that the deep, perspectival space of Renaissance painting was inviting in that it offered an escape into another realm, while Baroque images were comparatively intimidating, in that the subjects portrayed held a much stronger presence than those of Renaissance painting. From page 47,

"In the sixteenth-century room you were the beholder -- the welcomed guest invited by Christ and the Madonna unto the remote, Arcadian potta del cielo receding beyond them. Upon enter the seventeenth-century, you became the beheld -- held in place outside the space of the painting by the authority of glance and illusion."

Hickey goes on to suggest that we haven't been all that conscious of beauty in art since then. He argues that while the Renaissance valued beauty for its own sake, it has since been transformed into a promotional device. The Baroque Counter-Reformation gave us the distrust of beauty that I am feeling now, three-hundred years later.

I have little reason to doubt that this corruption of beauty in politics is the reason for the bad taste that I have in my mouth whenever I hear anyone say that their piece was a material exploration, but I am not confident enough to say that the two necessarily have to be separated. Siegle, afterall, would probably say that they have to be merged.

Kierstin