Blue narcissus: Robyn Stacey
'Which artist does not shrivel up and die when told their work is beautiful?', asks artist Michael Petry. In contemporary art, he adds, 'it is a crime to speak of beauty, to imply that it exists ... for beauty is all emptied out, hollow, shallow, only surface deep, like a good wine to be swallowed and pissed away' (Petry, 1997, 7).
This fear and suspicion of beauty is of course linked to a broader spurning of traditional aesthetics throughout the 20th century. The aesthetic experience came to be seen as embedded in a particular perspective more to do with bourgeois values than with universal standards. Beauty came to be regarded as a 'disinterested' mask for more instrumental objectives, deceptively posing as a tabula rasa but receptive only to certain messages—the deployment of classical beauty for fascist ends is perhaps only the most spectacular example of this. Beauty's perceived blankness was also readily coopted by advertising and commercial interests, which, for many artists, further corrupted it as a site or a strategy for creative and critical endeavour.
Moreover, beauty's traditional association with wholeness, as 'the delicate membrane that keeps in check the nightmare of disintegration' (Charles Taylor, in Petry, 1997, 37), made it an obvious target for those artists celebrating the fragmentation of modernist truths and conventions. With postmodernism, the beautiful was denigrated in favour of the sublime, or in Kant's and Burke's terms, quality denigrated in favour of quantity, form in favour of unboundedness, charm in favour of terror, pleasure in favour of pain.
But perhaps a reinvestment in beauty by contemporary artists is overdue. Perhaps artists have resisted engaging with the beautiful because this entails the risky manoeuvre of