Week 2: Amelia Jones on Exclusionary Beauty

Blog Post topic:

"Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure:

Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics"

by Amelia Jones

Amelia Jones thoroughly went over many key points about artistic beauty in her writing, which was originally written as a talk. She uses many references to the writings of “great figures in the history of aesthetics” as she says, to dismantle the exclusionary framework they’ve built as their authority to judge artistic aesthetics. Dave Hickey's “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” gets a special emphasis from Jones as an outdated contemporary perspective. Although we all agreed in class that this was a difficult read as we read it, I’m only really frustrated that we don’t have more time as a class with this reading. I found myself looking up many things, too many things, as I tried to understand Jones as clearly as she was intending to be heard. Her writing is so full of content and intentional meaning that I was reading some parts many times over. After all of my examining, study, and exploration, it is clear to me that this was written as a response to the international status that perspectives similar to Hickey’s have in art discourse.

I think that ultimately the concept of defining beauty is so great of a challenge that Jones was not defining it at all, but rather disagreeing that it is as Hickey said it was. She highlights Hickey's personal beauty preferences and his requirement of disinterest, which conflicts with the appeal that beauty naturally has in his definition. Disinterest was, in Hickey's explanation, a signifier of superior judgement in disconnecting from the material world. Even more, his perspective seems to be obviously self-authenticating exclusionary rhetoric. I found myself agreeing with her assessment that Hickey’s definition was self-affirming and “yet another version of a very old game that operates to privilege a particular group as having access to the truth.”

When I looked up the simpler words like beauty, interest, and enfranchise, I found it’s the words we think we know easily that can sometimes surprise us in how a dictionary defines them. Beauty is consistently and basically known to be appealing in some way to an individual. That concept and expectation varies greatly from person to person, and so claiming an authority on what that could or should be is to devalue the authenticity of someone’s perspective because they don’t agree with your perspective. I believe there is no way to know all or enough perspectives to create an all-inclusive definition of beauty for all, so no, I don’t think there’s a way to make a realistic definition of universal beauty.

This reading was so interesting that I would love to study it more and incorporate it into my own art and possibly future teaching. My art is always evolving and I’m always trying to add more to what I can do with it, so I would love to explore the concept of beauty again. I've always thought of my artwork as my voice, and so I don't exactly aim to make beautiful art, but impactful work which sometimes reflects beauty. Since I aim to create art that is meaningful to me and my community, I feel this could be a great opportunity to involve the community in their perspectives to create a dynamic piece of art based on our disconnected (but also united in the piece) community definition. I think it’s interesting that I hadn’t thought much about this concept in particular until I wanted to disagree with Hickey about it. Beauty is something that just is, as far as I was concerned. And now I will think about it more and ponder how simple it might not be after all.

Cited in Jones' writing

Yo Mama!
Renee Cox, 1993
www.reneecox.org/yo-mama

 

Amelia Jones, “Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure: Beauty Discourse and     the Logic of Aesthetics," in Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton & Jeffrey Rhyne (eds.), Aesthetics in     a Multicultural Age (Oxford University Press, 2002)