all ye need to know?

I've recently been reading some recent literature on beauty, notably Arthur Danto's volume of his Paul Carus Lectures, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art.  I was moved to do so after - what else? - June's visit to the Clark Art Institute.  I hadn't been there since a child, and the visit not only brought back a number of happy memories, it surprised me with how beautiful the museum and its collection was.  That may sound odd.  What could be surprising about a museum, especially one focused on European painting (and mostly French and American nineteenth century painting at that) being beautiful?  It was, I think, how overwhelmingly present it was as an aesthetic choice, how extravagant - unashamed, even.  Not content with scads of Impressionist paintings, the collection emphasized by turns the most opulent or frothiest tendencies of the school.  Monet and Renoir dominated, with Pissarro and Degas providing distant echoes (and to move beyond Impressionism, Cézanne wasn't present at all, at least in the galleries.)  Among the older paintings, jewel-like early Renaissance and Netherlandish examples dominated over the few seventeenth century Dutch works, and buoyant eighteenth century French rococo was well-represented.  And then, to return to the nineteenth century, there were the rooms full of charming minor juste-milieu paintings, almost always of beautiful young women alone in orientalized interiors, or outdoors in parklike settings, images of careless elegance.  Even that old grouch Homer contributed a luminous sunset.

And what's wrong with that?  Nothing at all - the whole museum is like champagne and wedding cake.  But just as the dietary scolds will warn you not to try to live on champagne and cake alone, aesthetic scolds will find something wanting in the artistic diet that the Clark offers.  The chastising of the sort of taste the Clark displays forms part of the intellectual history and philosophical problems that Danto examines in his book.  I haven't quite finished it, so I'll save any specific comments for later.  I will say that while his broad conclusion - that beauty may be part of art and yet not necessary to it, though it is still necessary for life - does not seem wrong to me, he arrives at it through along a path that takes more than a few wrong turns and odd detours.  At the end, or as near to it as I've reached, he's defending a role for beauty in contemporary art, even as it becomes harder to imagine what exactly Danto thinks beauty is.  But more on that soon.