ON BEAUTY: A History of a Western Idea

[논둑길맨발로]

Eco's Illustrated Presentation on the History of Beauty and Ugliness

at Toronto University in Canada in 2008 

움베르트 에코 참고 동영상 http://videolectures.net/cd07_eco_thu/

위 강의는 History of Beauty와 짝을 이루는 또 다른 저서 ON UGLINESS 에 대한 에코의 강연입니다. 우리의 세계 즉 미의 세계만 이해 하면 짝눈이 되고 말 것입니다. 시대별로 못생김의 표준이 어떻게 변해 왔는지를 동시에 살펴 봅시다.

The Times

November 6, 2004

1.On Beauty by Umberto Eco

Hey, good-looking

reviewed by LISA JARDINE

ON BEAUTY: A History of a Western Idea
Ed. by Umberto Eco
Secker and Warburg, £30; 220pp
ISBN 0 436 20517 3
Buy the book

Last May, when David Beckham unveiled his latest tattoo — a winged crucifix spread-eagled boldly across the back of his neck — a howl of disapproval went from the tabloid press. As far as they were concerned, the English football captain had permanently, and apparently wilfully, damaged his perfect Anglo-Saxon beauty.

But the ideal of male beauty to which Beckham’s body-art adornment was addressed was no Greco-Roman Adonis figure. The star was not interested in some old European high cultural tradition of timeless, idealised male beauty. His tattoos, like his bravura haircuts and his designer clothes, are directed confidently at a British youth well versed in a 21st-century fusion version of beauty, global in its vision and rainbow in its aesthetic alliances.

This is the street-savvy, Caribbean-inspired beauty celebrated in the exhibition of Black British Style, at the V&A in London. That exhibition includes graffiti-print denim jackets by the British designer Walé Adeyemi worn by Beckham and his son Brooklyn, which inspired a flood of high-street copies, worn by urban youth of every colour. Beckham’s beauty has that essential African inner strength of ashé — a heady blend of confidence and cool.

Here is a modern example of that old adage: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, as it is adapted to the 21st century. Who cares if the chattering classes call it uncouth, if you get respect on the street? What is striking as one scans newspapers and magazines is the confidence with which contemporary Britain seems able to embrace that idea of variable viewpoint when it comes to deciding who or what is beautiful.

Aishwarya Rai, the heart-stoppingly good-loooking star of Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood version of Pride and Prejudice, is already well-established as the movie-star pin-up for all India. With Bride and Prejudice she is just as easily hailed by moviegoers here as an icon of British beauty for our time.

Europeans have never defined their standards of beauty in isolation from outside influences. Throughout history, Western notions have been contested, stimulated and enriched by the arrival of rare and desirable treasures from beyond Europe’s borders.

In the 1450s Benozzo Gozzoli modelled the three kings in his ravishing Adoration of the Magi frescoes in the Medici family chapel in Florence on recent visitors from Byzantium, including the Emperor John Paleologus in full oriental splendour and riding an unfamiliar and exotic-looking pure-bred Arab horse.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gozzoli_magi.jpg

Venetian artists such as Gentile Bellini returned in the late 15th century from terms as artists-in-residence to the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, bringing images of turbaned men, veiled women, strange landscapes and unfamiliar architecture, which rapidly found their place in the art of less well-travelled emulators like Dürer and Pinturicchio.

In the 16th century, peonies, chrysanthemums and tulips, all recent imports from the East, grown and further diversified by cross-breeding in the botanical gardens of Holland, took pride of place in the sumptuous Dutch paintings of flower-filled vases, which set a standard of beauty for still-life emulated across Europe right down to the present day. The lush silks and brocades sent as gifts by sultans to their European counterparts were copied for domestic consumption, their dazzling beauty part and parcel of an aesthetic which infuses Renaissance religious and secular art in the garments of saints and sinners alike. Iznik pottery and Chinese porcelain lent their exquisite beauty of form and line to late-arriving European products, culminating in the 18th century in French Sèvres porcelain, still widely admired. Fascinated with Japan’s distinctive visual ideal of beauty, the 19th century paid homage to it in painting, dress and fine lacquered furniture.

Today the pace of such shaping influences on European beauty may have accelerated, but the spirit of exuberant consumption of beauty in all its variety is recognisably the same. What we find beautiful is what we find desirable, what we ache to own or be or look like. Not, of course, in reality. We couldn’t look like that if we tried, we couldn’t ever afford that dress or that piece of jewellery. Our ideal of beauty is the stuff of our dreams and aspirations, what we yearn to have and hold and handle.

Of course, there has always been an alternative view. Regular attempts are made to show that beauty is no such tainted consumer-driven thing. The Ancient Greeks argued philosophically that beauty was a timeless ideal, which gave a pure kind of pleasure unrelated to the urge to acquire, and a tradition persists that wants to ascribe permanence and certainty to that which we identify as incontrovertibly a thing of beauty. How reassuring it would be to find a set of fixed bearings in a disturbingly unstable and shifting world.

Umberto Eco’s visual essay on Western European aesthetics, On Beauty, is the latest to attempt to offer the definitive account of the development of an assured and trans-historical beauty in the West. He traces a genealogy of Western European beauty that conforms closely to Ancient Graeco- Roman ideals of “absolute” beauty, and the accompanying lavish illustrations replicate the set of images to be found in any standard, synthetic History of Art.

From the author of genius who gave us The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum in all their dark narrative complexity, such a tired tale is a disappointment. For the history of Western beauty is surely a far more dynamic, exuberant and passionate matter. When, at the end of his standard survey of European art (and a smattering of thinkers and poets), Eco does eventually arrive at today’s enthusiastic dynamism in the face of global and proliferating beauty, he heralds its incomprehensible variety with evident regret: “Our explorer from the future will no longer be able to identify the aesthetic ideal diffused by the media of the 20th century and beyond. He will have to surrender before the orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and absolute and unstoppable polytheism of beauty.”

This difference of opinion over the nature of beauty is of more than academic interest. To reaffirm beauty’s inaccessibility to any criteria which fall within the experience of the “ordinary viewer”, to insist that its parameters are those honed through the passage of time by those in the know, is to isolate all but the few from any meaningful engagement with it. In acknowledging the dazzling diversity of today’s European ideals of beauty we accept a widened, democratic and global participation in what is to be cherished and admired. We salute an openness to influence beyond the nation state which has to be a cause for hope in a dangerous world.

When I was a girl, growing up in the Cotswolds, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrant parents, my inability to conform to any standards of British “beauty” recognised by the inward-looking local community we found ourself in was a source of chronic and unrelieved adolescent despair. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” was, as I recall, the hollow adage with which my long-suffering mother would try in vain to reassure the bosomy, dark-haired, olive-skinned, 5ft 3in (1.6m) teenaged me, as I sulked around the house gazing morosely at pictures of long, lean, blonde, flat-chested models peddled by women’s magazines — and preferred by the Cheltenham boys — as the acme of female beauty. I didn’t believe my mother then — no adolescent prince was going to come along and recognise my unconventionally beautiful soul. But it is surely a sign of how completely the kaleidoscope diversity of the cultural global village has colonised Britain since my childhood, that that cliché actually has a ring of hope about it today.

What's more . . .

The Naked Woman by Desmond Morris (Cape)

2.On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea
edited by Umberto Eco
438pp, Secker & Warburg, £30

Umberto Eco is notorious as the Italian professor of semiotics who wrote a bestseller, The Name of the Rose, which sparked off a host of imitators and invigorated interest in the study of medieval art and culture. In addition to all that, he has been an editor in TV and publishing, a columnist for an avant garde monthly, and a prolific essayist. If there is such a thing as a renaissance man, Eco is it.

On Beauty is an encyclopedia of images and ideas about beauty ranging from ancient Greece to the present day. It begins with 20 pages of reproductions of paintings and photographs, representing an enormous range of cultural icons, from Bronzini's Allegory of Venus to characteristic snapshots of David Beckham and George Clooney. More paintings decorate the next 400 pages of quotations from philosophers and writers - Plato, Boccaccio, San Bernardo. Kant, Heine, et al. The book is arranged according to various themes rather than chronologically, although, given the fact that it begins with the aesthetic ideals of ancient Greece and ends with pop art and the mass media, the chronology seems self-evident. On the other hand, as Eco points out in his introduction, "this is a history of Beauty and not a history of art (or of literature or music)". He goes on to ask the obvious question - "why is this history of Beauty documented solely through works of art?" - and he replies by claiming that "over the centuries it was artists, poets, and novelists who told us about the things they considered beautiful and they were the ones who left us examples. Peasants, masons, bakers or tailors also made things that they probably saw as beautiful, but only a very few of these artefacts remain."

This is an answer which seems surprisingly unimaginative for a polymath of Eco's acumen, if only because it provokes a great many more questions about the book's structure and content. The introduction concludes that "Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country" - beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Having read this, I found myself wondering why the book confines itself to examples of beauty from western Europe and the iconography of Hollywood movies. On this evidence the populations of Russia, the Middle East, China, India, Japan, Africa and South America have had no concepts of beauty or at least no artefacts worthy of display, and while it is reasonable to suppose that the scope of On Beauty 's illustrations is the product of individual taste, their limitations seem to be defying the main thrust of its argument. As a result, although we've been told with some force that this is a history of beauty, rather than art, it reads very much like an eclectic primer of western aesthetics and painting. This impression is reinforced by Eco's assertion of an essential "link between art and beauty". It seems a curious claim after a century in which artists struggled to reject precisely this link between themselves and Renaissance beliefs. (The "new realist" painter Fernand Léger페르낭 레제, for instance, lecturing in the 1930s, argued that art was actually a barrier between the people and "the domain of the beautiful".)

The problem is highlighted in the chapters on "monstrosities", and "ugliness". Eco describes the medieval fascination with representations of devilish monsters and the pangs of hellfire, and argues that centuries of aesthetic theory presented ugliness as the antithesis of beauty, that the moral significance of ugliness lies in being a fundamental strand of a complex universe.

One revealing aspect of these arguments is that they are the product of a view from the centre of a traditional European cosmos, and it's hard to imagine what the notion of monstrosity might mean were it to be tested against the background of a nonEuropean universe. But it's not only in the world outside Europe that definitions of this kind begin to lose their force and meaning.

In a European environment ruled by a polymorphous clutch of moral and religious rubrics, a large proportion of the population continues, for reasons which are essentially mysterious, to be fascinated by phenomena that are grotesque, monstrous or downright disgusting. The contemplation of medieval monstrosities can, no doubt, be paralleled by the popularity of Victorian freak shows, or, in the present day, our delight in the varieties of horror peddled through the cinema, TV and the computer screen.

From a contemporary standpoint, our fascination with fabulous monsters has now been divorced from morality, religious awe or even curiosity, and the underlying aesthetic is more to do with pure sensation. The Renaissance invention of ugliness, therefore, can no longer stand in support of the category beauty. For a large swath of contemporary practitioners, also, the idea of a beautiful representation is part of an aesthetic ideal which the American painter Barnett Newman described as "the bugbear of European art".

On Beauty avoids discussing these contradictions, and the consequence is a beautifully produced guidebook to the classical and Renaissance practice that linked together ideas about art and beauty. The promise of Eco's introduction, however, never comes near fulfilment, and there's a curious sense that the book's editor was only half involved, that the assembly of the various elements took place on different sites and drew on different traditions. On the other hand, maybe that is the logic of Eco's Renaissance-inflected sensibility. When he's experimenting, trying to break new ground, the result can be a brilliant synthesis; when he's recycling orthodoxies, as he is here, you get an incoherent hotch-potch of elements - a bit of a fudge.

· Mike Phillips's London Crossings: A Biography of Black Britain is published by Continuum.

3.On Beauty: a History of a Western Idea, Ed. Umberto Eco, trans Alastair McEwen

The art of missing the point

By John Armstrong

Friday, 12 November 2004

 

There is an attractive idea behind this book - or rather, behind the CD-rom from which the book derives. On Beauty illustrates Western beauty in art from ancient Greece to the present in a ravishing display of images. These are placed alongside about 200 fairly lengthy extracts, in small print, from the standard texts: Plato, Plotinus, Hegel, Nietzsche and more. The images are gorgeous while the impressive documents are, understandably, hard going. The third strand of the book consists of a sequence of essays, a running commentary on the history of the idea of beauty.

The book is timely; there has been a recent surge of interest in beauty, but as yet it has not made much headway in the discussion of art. Art history is still crippled by a sociological obsession. While works of art obviously do reveal a lot about the societies in which they were produced, such revelation is - in the end - trivial. It is ridiculous to say that what is humanly important about Vermeer lies in what we can learn about his times.

 http://www.google.co.kr/images?q=Vermeer&btnG=%EA%B2%80%EC%83%89&hl=ko&lr=&newwindow=1&prmd=ivnsul&ei=jxZPTY5ekf69A7efjTU&sa=N&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&oi=image_result_group&sa=X

Hand on heart, who really cares about 17th-century Delft? The discussion of beauty is much more promising as a way of trying to understand why works of art actually matter to us - how we can delight in them, rather than merely find them interesting.

The special interest of this book must depend on the quality of Umberto Eco's engagement with the images and texts. After all, there are lots of books of nice pictures and plenty of anthologies of specialist writings about art. Eco, we hope, will draw images and ideas together. The point will lie in the wit and insight with which the two are brought into a shared conversation. We expect a stylish, passionate and engaged discussion that will educate and fire the imagination.

But, right from the start, one begins to suspect that not all is well with this project. The introduction makes a stab at pinning down the topic. This is a book about beauty - can we get a bit clearer about that elusive notion? Eco has a go: beauty is a bit like goodness, but different. How? Goodness is something you desire but "beauty is a good that doesn't arouse desire". One wants to shout, "But obviously beauty does sometimes arouse our desire for possession: we want that lamp because it's beautiful."

What Eco presumably means is that we do not first desire the object for the status it conveys, the practical use it serves or the wealth it represents and, on that basis, find it beautiful. Beauty doesn't proceed from other desires, but if we find something beautiful we may well desire to possess it.

What's troubling here is the crudity of Eco's mistake. To write "beauty does not arouse desire" is stunningly false. One can only assume that Eco had the other point (familiar to anyone of his erudition) in mind and simply could not be bothered finding a neat way of putting it.

The commentary as a whole, which should have been the soul of the book, is disappointing. Only one half of it is actually written by Eco, but this might as well as have been written by someone else. At one point he's telling the story of aestheticism, the "religion" of beauty. It traces the shifts in thinking from dandyism ("I make my exterior a work of art") to Impressionism, which attempts to isolate the fleeting charm of a moment. The lineage he traces is not remotely original. This is a stock chapter in the history of art. Fine; so perhaps he'll tell it in his own special and exciting way?

He doesn't. Here's a standard passage: "In Flaubert, the predominant feature is the cult of the right word, which can only confer harmony, an absolute aesthetic necessity, to the page. Whether he is observing with ruthless meticulous accuracy the banality of everyday life and the vices of his day (as in Madame Bovary) or evoking an exotic sumptuous world, pregnant with sensuality and barbarism (as in Salammbo) or tending towards demonic visions and the glorification of Evil and Beauty (The Temptation of St Anthony), his ideal remains that of an impersonal, precise, exact language, capable of making any subject beautiful thanks to the sheer power of his style."

This is just a wordy rehash of the standard textbook view. Having fired this summary at us, Eco does nothing with it. He doesn't tell us anything about the novels, he doesn't develop the notion of the "right word", or even give us an example of it. Then it's straight onto the next item, treated in exactly the same way.

There isn't any attempt to reach out to the audience, to explain why something might be interesting or valuable. There is a "survey" feel to this sort of writing, with no hint that one might want to share Flaubert's obsessions or that they have any resonance beyond his own time.

It's a case of, "now you've heard of one more strange idea someone once had." Why is it good to know this? Eco doesn't suggest an answer. This is "the Philistinism of culture": the willingness to be impressed by an idea that has no depth for you. You must know about it because a famous person once said it. Any postdoctoral student can write at that level, and many do. Eco, we know from the jacket, is dazzlingly intelligent, a writer whose words "dance on the page". On other pages, in other books.

In any case, half of the commentary is written by one Girolamo de Michele. This ghost-writer is acknowledged only in tiny print - among the technical data, after the ISBN and the postal address of Random House South Africa. And that is the level of recognition he deserves, even though he has been responsible for the discussion of many of the key periods: antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Addressing an exceptionally lovely portrait of a young woman by Ghirlandaio, the ghost says: "Reality imitates nature without being a mere mirror to it and, in the detail (ex ungue leonem, as Vasari put it, 'you may tell the lion by his claws'), it reproduces the Beauty of the whole. This ennoblement of the simulacrum would not have been possible without some decisive progress in pictorial and architectonic techniques." No elaboration, no clarification. The pompous prose - I select one of many such passages - is painfully exposed beside the portrait's tender clarity.

On Beauty belongs to the genre of the illustrated textbook; the writing does little to entice the reader. It certainly is "a remarkable new work from one of the world's most renowned writers and thinkers" - remarkable, that is, for the writing's lack of passion, wit, sensitivity and intellectual grace. Ironically, these are the very qualities so movingly evident in the illustrations.

John Armstrong's 'The Secret Power of Beauty' is published by Allen Lane

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[논둑길맨발로]

테리! 음력 새해부터는 다시 합류할 수 있겟지요. 새해 연휴 동안 에코의 참고 동영상 ON UGLINESS를 NOTE TAKING 해보면 어떨까요? 동키호테 파들이 모여야 일이되지...ㅋㅋㅋ

[terrysim0401]

예???지금 다른 것 하다가 잠깐 들어가 확인해보니 동영상이 "1시간12분22초"짜리던데,이걸 저 혼자 다 하라구요???
농담이시죠??8분,9분짜리도 헥헥대고 하고 있는데요.....(지금도 "25일" 토론주제 동영상도 헥헥대며 딕테이션
하고 있다구염!!)
이렇게 긴~~~건~~~~ 저 혼자서 절대 못해요!!
전에 "장하준"동영상(20분짜리)도 며칠을 했는데요~~(나중엔 지겨워서 기절하는 줄 알았음!!)
흑흑........절 딕테이션하다 망부석이 되길 원하시는 게 분명하삼!!!!!
글고 지금 제가 문자드렸는데 받으셨나요?
저 2월달 등록문제로 참가 못할 수도 있겠는데요(킥킥!!등록안되면 신나게 노~~올~~자~~ㅎㅎ)
제가 보낸 문자 확인하시길.......

[논둑길맨발로]

1.-케이티,미니,릴리
2- 테리,에드윈,헤일리
3.-수잔, 쥬리,베로니카
하나-동영상 내용 정리
위 기사 서평들의 내용이 에코의 작업에 대한 한계와 비판에 촛점을 맞추고 있어 이를 통해 에코의 미에 대한 견해를 파악하는 데에는 한계가 있습니다. 동영상을 중심으로 토론하는 것이 더 효과적일 듯 합니다. 하나가 얼마나 친절하게 수고를 해주시는 가가 중요한 사안이 되었습니다. 동학들을 위한 '고운 마음 보시'를 기대합니다. 위 서평 기사에 얽매이지 마시고 각자 인터넷에서 에코의 미에 대한 정보를 취합해 보시기 바랍니다. 에코의 견해를 상세하게 설명하고 있는 서평을 발견하시면 게시판에 올려주실 것을 부탁드립니다.