The Arts of the Beautiful as Mimesis

Introduction: From Art Work to Artist

    The perception of art as a creative process stemming from the mind of the artist has grown increasingly common, especially in a post-modern age that prizes subjectivity. This has led to the glorification of the individual talent creating the art, leading to the increasing importance of the artist against the importance of the beauty of the artwork.

    According to Gilson, the arts of the beautiful are arts wherein the end is the creation of an artwork that is beautiful. This notion of what is art being determined by the beauty of the work produced has ancient roots in the West. The artist had begun as a slave, almost anonymous except for what signature he can impute upon the work of art he created. His masters, as is the wont of human beings since time immemorial, had desire for beautiful things. The artist’s only purpose in his master’s household was to satiate that desire for the beautiful. The artist was the household artisan responsible for the death mask and the household gods. The artist was the slave woman on the lyre, pleasuring her mistress through her ministrations on the strings of her instrument. The artist was the calligrapher who endowed his master’s correspondence with a visual grace that complimented whatever message the master sent.

    Even the ancient artist whom no master owned did not escaped the bondage of creating the beautiful for those who craved it. Myron honoured athletes and victors in order to honour the art of statuary. The blind Homer composed epic poetry that his people may see themselves in their own heroes. The artists of these ages were never without masters, though some did not have owners. This pattern would continue, pouring from the Greeks to the various European kingdoms and empires that succeeded them.

    The Renaissance saw the balance begin to shift from the artist as slave to the artist as transcendent genius. This shift precipitated another one; the shift in focus from the beauty of the art work to the creativity of the artist. To be sure, the artist was still beholden to men richer than he was, for no artist could hope to satisfy his vocation without a patron. Michelangelo Buonarroti flourished under Medici and Papal patronage, just like his contemporaries. However, emerging in the Renaissance was the notion that man is all things, and that the genius of man knows no bounds. The works of man have begun to be seen in light of the greatness of man. Slowly, man begun to look inward into himself as the source of his own mastery, and the artist was no exception.

    The tension between the beauty of the artwork and the genius of the artist would persist long after the Renaissance. As the artist perfected his technique, his name grew in stature. Eventually, technique turned into the highly personalized “style”, and the attachment of styles to names further placed the artist at the center of the arts of the beautiful.

    The 20th century, with its brutal wars and general disillusionment, saw the artist finally break free from his final chain, which is the need for his artwork to be beautiful. It is in this age that the triumph of the notion that art stems from the transcendent genius of the artist can be seen. Painting, for example, saw the discarding of centuries of technique as perfected by the old Academic masters in favour of “styles” and schools that routinely confound what most people found beautiful, such as the abstract work of Picasso and the surrealist work of Dali. So unimportant had beauty become that the post-modern artist has disregarded beauty altogether, as Tony Barrett wrote in his book “Criticizing Art”. This triumph of the artist’s autonomy from the standards of beauty is implicit even in Gilson’s work, especially where he implies that it is the presence of abstract forms of art that determines whether an art is an art of the beautiful.  

The Arts of the Beautiful Must Produce Beauty

    When Andy Warhol made a splash in the art scene with his “Brillo Box”, critic Arthur Danto pronounced art ended, for it was now indistinguishable from the everyday object. The statement was meant to herald a new age of art, for it was the old art that was now dead. However, the birth of a new art has complications.

    Paul Mattick wrote a chapter on Andy Warhol and his philosophy. In that chapter, he presented Andy Warhol in the eyes of several critics. One critic posits that what makes art is where it is placed. Another saw Warhol as externalizing his inner psyche. Another saw Warhol as a socialist champion. But, rather than form the basis for a new art, all this shows is how problematic the new art is. By reducing the standards to process and statement, there is nothing to signify art apart from everything else. The sheer relativity of the standards meant that there is no art, only the artist. The art has become a slave of the artist.

    Without beauty, the arts of the beautiful, to give a more macabre meaning to Danto’s statement, are truly at an end. There is no more “fine” in fine arts, for the art work produced by the fine arts cannot be an end in itself any longer. One look at Warhol and his critics, we see art reduced to subjective décor (determined by place), art reduced to therapeutic output and art reduced to propaganda. In each case, art exists for the sake of the artist, that he may boost his ego, espouse his message or “empower” whomever. Several decades after the end of art, one may be forgiven for wondering if a new one had even begun.     

    Art, in a technical sense of the word, involves technique. After all, when one speaks of the “art” of war, or the “art” of speech, one is talking about the best ways to go about each endeavour. However, more than technique, art is a habit. What passes from the mind onto the hands, or voice is tempered or enhanced by constant practice and guidance from traditions external to the artist. In the arts of the beautiful, the habits that are to be inculcated are those that are necessary in creating something beautiful. Beauty, however, is perceived not in the workings of the hands but in the recesses of the mind. So, the habit of creating something beautiful includes the inculcation of a habit in the mind of determining what is beautiful. Without this, the habits of the mind practiced by the so-called artist stray to other ends. Some would come into the habit of thinking of art as décor, or something to be placed in a museum. That art practiced then is habit of creating something that museums might consider displaying. Some would adopt the habit of thinking of art as self-expression and actualization. Afterwards, all of their art is created, not to be beautiful, but to be expressions of their inner psyches or whatever mass of meanings they hold dear. Some would adopt the habit of thinking of art as the creation of as pure a personal form as possible. This leads to the creation of art that is as abstract as possible, with the only criteria being its own originality and uniqueness. Lost in all this is beauty. While some of the art mentioned above may stumble upon beauty, beauty is incidental to their creation. As such, the art of the beautiful ceases to be.

To Produce the Beautiful is Mimesis

    What, then, is beautiful art? Man’s concept of beauty originates from his own mind, where what is beautiful is discerned against a million moments of experience. But, according to Aristotle, what reaches the mind takes its first step into it through the senses. Therefore, man’s ideas on what is beautiful begins with what he senses is beautiful.

    What man believes is beautiful does not stem from a vacuum and translates immediately into pure form. Man’s first touch of beauty occurs within nature, or within his external reality. He sees a sunset and finds the colours in their constant fluctuation beautiful. He sees a tiger and finds the symmetry both fearful and enticing. He hears a bird sing and finds it wonderful. He hears himself speak, and feels a pleasure in the rhythms of his voice and words. In these moments are his notions of beauty formed, in images preserved and discerned in the mind from the senses. Since the arts of the beautiful must result in art work that is beautiful, in their creation man must draw upon that well in his mind where dwells everything he considers “beauty”.

    This beauty is what he recreates when he seeks to create an art work that is beautiful. He creates a work that is solely the work of his hands, but is imputed with the images of beauty he retained in his mind. These images, stemming from nature, will be the basis of the beauty in his works of art. This is mimesis.

    At this point, it would be prudent to define the terms used. By “nature”, what is meant here is more akin to the term “natural habitat” than “natural world”. It is not restricted solely to objects that exist independent of man. The word is taken to mean the surroundings external to the man who exists in them. Therefore, one can speak of man drawing from “nature” even if “nature” here is the urban environment he grew up in. When it is said in this essay that man draws from nature, it means that he is drawing from the environment around him, even if many of the elements in his environment are man-made.

    By “mimesis”, what is meant in this essay is mimesis in the Aristotelian sense. Mimesis is not the copying of nature, but rather, the process of selection, translation and transformation of an image man has taken from nature into an object that is of his own making. It is a kind of imitation, but it is also a stylization or perfection of the object imitated. So, to do mimesis is not to simply copy an image or an object in its exactness. It can also involve taking an image or object and retranslating or reproducing it into another media, with the replicator’s own personal touches and transformations.

    If what man determines as beautiful stems from sensory experience stored in images and memories in the mind, then the creation of an art work meant to beautiful is an act of mimesis. This is, of course, most evident in arts of the beautiful wherein imitation (in the closer to the “copy” sense) and representation are part of the material used to create a beautiful form. The ancient Greek sculptor Myron is heralded by both his contemporaries and the Greco Roman critics that followed as one of the greatest sculptors his civilization has produced, mainly because the harmony of his proportions led to the creation of lifelike statues. Implicit in the admiration is the perception of likeness to reality (moderated by a certain idealization) as key to perceiving a statue as beautiful. The Academic Masters have honed their painting techniques to such a point where their paintings can rival photographs in their imitation of real objects.

    But, what of abstract art? While it is easy to believe that abstract art is closer to pure form detached from any similarity in nature, one must take into account that the images in abstract art stem from somewhere. Picasso, for example, may have put a nose on the forehead or an ear on a chin, but before he deconstructs the image of the human face he must first begin with the image of human face. Jackson Pollock, to take another example, to the extent that his works are “beautiful”, may indulge in the technique of criss-crossing different lines of colour with each other. But, to the extent that his colour combinations can be called beautiful, these combinations of colours match something once perceived in reality and perceived to be beautiful. Abstract art, to the extent that such art is beautiful, still carries with it the ghost of mimesis. The translation and transformation aspects of mimesis may be taken to extremes, but the original image taken from nature is still in there, buried under layers of translation and transformation.

    What about music, then? The arrangement of sound in music cannot surely be found in nature. First, one must consider that the notion of “music not appearing in nature” is true only if we use “nature” in the strictest sense; that is, of nature as the world of things not of man’s making. However, if we take nature to mean the environment man moves in, then music is surely a part of any habitation of man. Furthermore, the music he hears is layered by generation upon generation of translation and transformation. What may have begun as music in imitation of birdsong may have long evolved into a form that is different from anything sounding like birdsong, but similarly evocative.

    Another way mimesis manifests itself in music is in the arrangement itself. The beauty of an arrangement of music is in its arrangement; rhythms and mathematical exactness, tension and release, the adventure in the notes as they begin in harmony, descend into tension and dissonance, then come back home into harmony. The resulting sounds may not seemingly appear in nature, but the arrangements do. Man’s experience of rhythm in nature, of tension and release in nature, of symmetry in nature, are all present in man’s mimesis of music. Even the experience of the beauty of harmony in birdsong can result in the harmony man wants to imitate in his imposition of harmony in the sounds he arranges.

Conclusion: Beautiful Art is Mimesis

    When man sought to impose his mark upon the world around him, the mark he makes must stem from the world around him. The cave drawings the decorated the caveman’s abodes take the form of bison, bears, and whatever else the caveman encountered in his life. What the caveman presumably found beautiful can only be expressed in what he found beautiful in the world.

    When man talks of the beautiful, he can never do so in the purely abstract. He must always resort to imagery drawn from nature or to metaphors drawn from nature. He may speak of beauty as a voluptuous woman, or as an angry sea in a tempest, but he must always speak of beauty in terms of imagery and metaphor. The same is true for much of what man expresses. Love is a kiss or a kindly hand. Justice is a courtroom or a hanging. Nationhood is a flag or a race. The future is a post-apocalyptic wasteland or a utopian space colony. Even the non-corporeal angels must appear to man in the guise of winged men.  

    All this speaks to the embodied nature of man. While man may strive for purity of form, all of his expressions are inevitably drawn to the experiences of the body. The man who cannot sleep counts sheep, not abstract forms that are fully his own conception. This is true of beauty. What man finds beautiful, he found beautiful in nature first. When he creates an art work meant to be beautiful, he indulges in mimesis, attempting to recreate by his own hands and by his own vision that beauty he first saw in nature well before the first glint of the art work first crossed his mind’s eye.