Does Beauty Defines the Aesthetic Value of Art?

When art is beautiful, it makes it more consumable; it presents a facade that pulls in its audience by catching the eye

Photo of Zehra Shabbir Khan Zehra Shabbir KhanNovember 20, 2020

Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein assumed that art defies definition, that you know it when you see it. I am no one to defy the opinions of a philosopher wise as such but I do allow myself the liberty to formulate my thoughts upon his.

This is a fairly centrist and easy approach to the pursuit of art. Some fortunate day, I aspire to become a multi-disciplinary artist with a keen focus on painting and sculpture. So when I find myself stuck, I not only begin reading articles, books, courses, papers on the arts but also start practicing them. In this manner, I formulated what art is and what it does, at least in my opinion and experience.

Is art that which is beautiful? The idealized High-Renaissance Venus and perfection of the Virgin’s body in Michelangelo’s ‘La Pieta’ would say so. So would Oscar Wilde in the beauty of Dorian Gray with the rise of the aesthetic movement in English Literature. Perhaps, not coincidentally, ‘Laila aur Majnu’ are the embodiment of beauty, Kathak dancers line their eyes with kohl and wear ‘gajray’.

Beauty is the forefront of all the art we consume. I suppose, when art is beautiful, it makes it more consumable; it presents a facade that pulls in its audience by catching the eye. Additionally, proponents of aestheticism also add that there is no barrier holding an artist of any discipline back from a display of beauty and beauty only.

One may even argue that in the dry glitter of the vanity of everyday life, art for the sake beauty unveils all that is innately close to the heart but is forgotten in business, whether it just be background noise like many Pakistani dramas and the new genre of drama used as ambient noise introduced with the popular ‘Emily in France’ on Netflix, or as a more meditative form of bringing light to good in a dreary world. However, beauty is eventually just that and it is often a predilection invites criticism such as art is just a hobby for the rich, it is useless to the poor. No flowers on the wall bring food to the plate, after all.

But then what space does this definition leave for greats like Picasso and his ‘Still Life with Chair Caning’ during the rise of Cubism? And so, in a raging internal monologue, I told myself that art is that which stirs a valuable aesthetic emotion; a definition that is still formally accepted in philosophy. Virginia Woolf, safely my favorite author, wrote pages with one continuing sentence on the complexity of human emotion.

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Her book, Mrs. Dalloway, is a 200 page novel about a singular day in a woman’s life. Freddie Mercury and she would be best friends if they were alive together in how he sang ‘I Want To Break Free’ (and I would also be best friends with both of them). Then, maybe, art is an expression of the human condition.

Before the world became one large market, artists worked under patrons who bought their art as symbols of their own delicate interests and displayed them, in turn subsidising it for the rich and poor. Theatre since the King’s Men in the time of Shakespeare to the rise of the Civil Rights Movement with the Harlem Renaissance bears witness to this phenomenon.

Just recently, NAPA in Karachi held a week long theatre festival that was completely free of cost. Furthermore, art galleries like Canvas, VMArt, Koel and the like regularly put up displays from artists in Pakistan and abroad, completely free of cost.

This makes art increasingly accessible to the working class; the class that most needs validation for their feelings. Because people still fall in love, get angry, experience grief, feel alienated, with or without food on their plates; maybe more because of this conditional.

Yet, as a person who got acquainted with social differences and prejudices at a young age, art to me became a catalyst for marked revolution, mostly political. So Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ started to speak to me, Manet’s ‘Olympia’ met with Manto’s sympathetic depiction of sex workers that met Kathak dancers of Lahore’s red light area. Art stopped being art if it wasn’t revolutionary.

A question I stop to ask myself here is how tiring and crass the process of making and consuming art would get if it led back only to another workplace? In a world where people suffer limitlessly, are we allowed to turn our heads in the other direction for a moment of beauty and rest? To what do we owe and how much do we deserve the choice to even have this choice of denial because, after all, one cannot simply deny the reality of not having food on one’s plate.

In time, I have come to a malleable conclusion that it is an unequal blend of all three, at least to me; and yet this is a definition that remains contended widely and within myself.

Photo of Zehra Shabbir Khan Zehra Shabbir KhanNovember 20, 2020
Photo of Zehra Shabbir Khan

Zehra Shabbir Khan

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