By David Shrigley

The ancient Greeks admired the human form as the epitome of beauty and strove to represent it in beautiful statues as offering to the gods. The impressionists saw beauty in light and nature and strove to represent it on a canvas. But has beauty become a thing of the past?

If we describe beauty as the ability of things to grant us aesthetic, visual pleasure, contemporary art can be far from it. Contemporary artists seem to shun beauty en masse, to create art that can be shocking, irreverent, ugly, or just plain odd. Artist David Shrigley recently exhibited a show in the National Gallery of Victoria that featured a giant urinating statue. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg of wonderful oddities that can be found in contemporary art.

The goal of art was once to create beauty, and it is only in the last century that we have seen a shift towards anti-beauty. However, perhaps not every beautiful thing looks good at first sight, as Maria-Alina Asavei argues in her article Beauty and Critical Art: Is beauty at odds with critical political engagement?

I used to be one of those people that would point at modern artworks and say “I could do that.” Now I realise that yeah, maybe I could do that, but I didn’t. The way I see it, that’s largely the point of contemporary art – to put forward new ideas, to dazzle, to confuse, to question, to critique, to comment.. I could go on. Art doesn’t have to be aesthetically beautiful to beautiful through what it is saying. After all beauty is, in the end, subjective.

One of the things that sets us humans apart from the other mammals is the ability to make stuff, so we should do so. We should keep on making art of all kinds, aesthetically beautiful or not, as art can only contribute to the wonderful texture of our lives.

Referenced:

Maria-Alina Asavei, Beauty And Critical Art: Is Beauty At Odds With Critical–Political Engagement?, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 7, 2015, 16 June 2015