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'Rene [Ricard] and I used to have an argument. He'd say something like, "Well, that work is really beautiful", and I'd say, "So?" and he'd say, "Well, you hate art if you say 'So?' about something being beautiful" ... and I've come to realize that it's more complicated than this–"Well, maybe I just hate art when the only thing going for it is that it's beautiful."'[1]
When Ingrid Sischy said this in 1986 she was the young editor of Artforum and the quote was used to close a famous New Yorker article on Sischy and the New York art world by Janet Malcolm. The quote served to demonstrate the seriousness of Sischy and her disavowal of all that was extraneous, phoney and frivolous. Since then, she has come to realise it's more complicated than this and has co-curated the Art/Fashion Biennale de Firenze and become the editor of Interview. While this may not in itself mean anything at all, it is perhaps an indicator of the shift in status of the 'beautiful' in contemporary art. Dave Hickey might have got blank stares in 1991 for claiming 'beauty' was the issue of the '90s, but now, at the end of the decade, it seems like a perfectly reasonable contention.[2]
What Sischy's comments suggest is the fundamental relationship between beauty and trust when it comes to looking at art. It's a paradoxical relationship: on the one hand, beauty (a vague and fairly subjective term, admittedly) is often the function of something familiar, comforting, symmetrical, trustworthy, while on the other hand, it can be seen as a mask... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline