![]() And though armies of later theorists have worked tirelessly at wresting this Kantian judgment away from the individual, and placing it in a higher power (usually that means the administrator of a non-profit or head of a Hollywood studio nowadays), the direct unmediated pleasure of the individual in the face of the beloved can never really be displaced. ![]() You look at them with bedroom eyes.Įye of the beholder-isn’t that just poppycock? But this is the aesthetic force Kant described in his Critique of Judgment, where the locus of power in determining beauty really did reside in the onlooker. ![]() You, the reader, also have your very personal love relationships with specific cultural artifacts. My brother Dana (who is probably doing more right now to champion beauty than any living critic/practitioner of art) would fill his museum up with still different objects. Dave Hickey’s definition of beauty is different from mine-each of us would point to conflicting examples of it. I refuse to give you a definition of the beautiful, and for very good reasons. People are devoting half of their waking hours to the consumption of culture….Yet the cultural institutions are all in crisis.” “This helps us understand a curious situation in modern society. He was charged with obsessions, burning with intensity and eroticism.Īrt can do that. But he was like an interior decorator on steroids, filled with a supersized passion for his chosen objects. He was like that interior decorator in one big way-he celebrated the intense possessiveness and desire aroused by beautiful things. He wasn’t like an interior decorator filling a home with lovely objects. So clearly he wasn’t talking about beauty in any narrow sense of prettiness. In Hickey’s worldview, beautiful art was actually the most likely to get censored and attacked. But if they paid any attention to him, they knew that he consistently celebrated the most shocking and controversial works of art. The funny thing is that many people assumed that Hickey’s defense of beauty was reactionary-or sentimental or nostalgic or some other backward-looking thing. He had identified the one thing that possesses the most potential for disruption and transgression in the whole cultural hierarchy. In fact, Hickey had touched something huge.
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