Post-Modernism and the Loss of Beauty

Much of the project of Modernism was an attempt to critically evaluate (and possibly replace) fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment.  Post-Modernism was a re-evaluation of Modernism (with a critical review of Modernism’s project and solutions) and the Enlightenment. By challenging what is real, Post-Modernism confronted claims of objectivity as put forth by science.  By challenging grand-narratives, Post-Modernism denied a shared unifying cultural language and mythos.  What I want to look at now is the challenge to beauty.

The Modern artists inherited from the Enlightenment 200 years of evolving aesthetic theory that placed beauty as the prime concern and pinnacle achievement in the arts.  Some thinkers (notably Kant and Hegel) claimed beauty as either a universal truth or an  objective truth, while others (Hogarth) believed it to be a subjective state that was reducible to a set of attributes that could be used to judge a work of art as beautiful.

In the 20^th century the central concern for artists shifted from creating beautiful works to expression.  Recording the objective look of the outer world was replaced with giving expression to the subjective inner states. Some artists challenged beauty by looking at its opposite the grotesque, while others argued for judging work based on formalist criteria. Though there was not a single direction the critique of beauty took, it was not an all out abandoning of the idea of beauty.  Modernism didn’t have a problem with beauty as an idea but, rather, it argued about what was beautiful and proposed new alternatives.

Post-Modernism challenged the notion of beauty head-on. Some thinkers (Adorno) took a political approach and linked aesthetics to larger cultural concerns regarding authority and power.  Others looked at psychology and reinvestigated the nature of the sensation that was, at an earlier time, called a response to beauty.   Lyotard used the term the sublime (a state of pleasurable anxiety), Freud called it the uncanny (a state of feeling uncomfortable at experiencing something familiar and foreign at the same time).  Either way each identified the initial reaction as something terrible or frightening not exalted or pacifying.  Post-Modern artists (such as Chris Burden) exploit this through performance pieces that put the artist in danger and cause unease in the viewer.   This is a true loss of beauty.