Week2: BEAUTY

    

BEAUTY 

Hickey believes himself to be different from the historians because he says he doesn’t believe in meaning, politics, and purpose behind art. He feels art is an emotional inflictor that everyone is supposed to agree and have the same terms with an art piece. During the assigned reading I noticed a lot of Hickey’s views of beauty tend to be subjective and came from his own belief of beauty, even though he wanted to claim himself as the arbiter of beauty, that was simply not the case. He felt that beauty was obvious and that we are meant to all view art in the same light as him. He denies that beauty is subjective and claims it to be objective as he would compare this idea to mapplethorpe’s art work which would mostly consist of naked black men. I think of why he would use mapplethorpe to depict his idea of beauty as objective, and I believe it was because he was focused on the sexual tension that came from the art. I don’t believe he would look at the art and feel that as beauty, but instead it was a message for himself and to the viewer. The art provokes an emotion or a reaction from the viewer, and I’m sure he knew that.  Hickey had his belief of beauty and he was stuck in his own mindset. He sought art that appealed to men like him with his same ideology;  white skinned women, appearing innocent, and pure.  Showing off mapplethorpe goes against that idea and therefore it’ll prove the object of the art makes it beautiful rather than coming to terms with his own ideas. He claims that art is made as art and just because a body is exposed it is not considered pornography, but instead that is art. But what gives him the power to determine that? Why can’t he understand that art can be subjective, and it can be more than just the explicit human body?

Art is subjective and I strongly believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That saying is universal and it really proves how subject art really is. Not everyone is going to like the same artworks or find the same people attractive. People are not wired to be the same, maybe similar but never the same. Two people from completely different backgrounds can come together and possibly agree on an art piece that they’d both consider beautiful. Yet they could also completely bump heads and find different art works to be better than the others. Now how would someone say that one of those two people are right when everyone could feel different towards any art piece. Universal beauty may be possible but not common, and therefore I don’t think it is something that could be its own definition. Beauty is unlimited and has no end, art will always be changing and so will people and the perspective towards varieties of artwork from all over the world.