Art History: BVA 312 - 15/05/2019 (Essay research: Beauty and desire ancient and modern)

Choosing art topic for essay

“Primitivism” and Modern Art. What relationship can we find? 

Expressionists art? What does history tell us? 

Constructive movements in modern art and their effects. 

“Primitivism” and Modern Art. What relationship can we find?(271)

-The description of beauty.

-The most interesting particular aspect of beauty to be examined and described is desire. More precisely, I will compare two different ideas of the relationship between beauty and desire, one ancient and the other modern. 

-A comparison between ancient descriptions of beauty (such as those of Gorgias and Plato) and Kant’s definition of it in his third Critique. 

The attitude of beauty in the Greece era. (272)

-beauty of visual, primarily concerned the proportions of the human body, its shape an quality, its shape and qualities.

(273) 

- The more beautiful a piece of property is, the more valuable it is, therefore the more desirable it is. 

-Human life was the good life, so was beauty and ultimate goal of their aesthetic life and being. Constitute the ancient ideal of the kalokagathon(beautiful and good) life and personality. *Gorgias and Plato (the difference between these two shows a common ground, a very good example of the common ancient attitude and understanding of beauty. 

Viewpoints from Gorgias, Plato, and Professor Kant.  

Gorgias(274)

The bond between beauty and the desire to possess it is simply unbreakable. 

The nexus between beauty and desire bears all the characteristics of necessity and fate. 

Plato

He described a similar concept of beauty. In Symposium, Phaedrus and Phaedo.

-He presupposes that beauty is something that immediately engenders desire and lust, and uses it to facilitate the ascent towards science and ideas.  

“Beauty is already given as the object of desire; and beautiful entities and particulars, as well as the conception and the idea of beauty as such, are all definitely desirable. (276)

Plato’s theory, beauty or love (278)

Professor Kant (297)

And then, contrary to all that, some 20 centuries later, we find our Professor Kant, who turns all that upside down and appears to totally reverse this relationship of beauty, love, desire, lust and possession. For him, beautiful is that which does not create a desire to possess it According to him, beauty is and means disinterested liking.

-How can it be fond to me?

Connects beauty exclusively to taste (judgment of taste)

- After Kant is modernity. 

He defines and discerns beauty (280)

(282)

“Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful”

Relating beauty to taste

Thus, while the idea remains the same, the perspective and the context are definitely different.

Zistakis, A. (2019). Beauty and Desire Ancient and Modern. In Reid H. & Leyh T. (Eds.), Looking at Beauty to Kalon in Western Greece: Selected Essays from the 2018 Symposium on the Heritage of Western Greece (pp. 271-284). Sioux City, Iowa USA: Parnassos Press – Fonte Aretusa. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.sit.ac.nz:2096/stable/j.ctvcmxpn5.23