Must Art be Beautiful?

Jane Orton
Jul 14
9 min read

Dr. Orton introduces one of the biggest questions in the philosophy and history of art. Take a look at some of the world’s most influential art works and some of the most controversial, alongside some lesser-known works. Then decide for yourself: must art be beautiful?

*Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus*

For many people, art is synonymous with beauty. Paintings like Sandro Botticelli’s fifteenth century The Birth of Venus is one of the world’s most famous paintings and is noted for its beauty.

That doesn’t mean that art cannot do other things: sometimes beautiful art can serve a religious purpose. Michelangelo’s sixteenth century The Creation of Adam is the focal point of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Showing the moment of God’s transmission of the breath of life to Adam, the fresco’s beauty underlines the idea in the Old Testament that man was created in the image of God.

There are other things that art can do as well as being beautiful. Click the links to read about how Joris Hoefnagel’s beautiful illuminations were a competitive display produced for Emperor Rudolf II – or find out how Maria Sybilla Merian’s botanical illustrations contained important entomological insights.

Art for Art’s Sake

For some, art should be made for its own sake, not as an instrument to achieve something else. Oscar Wilde’s famous Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is an example of this kind of argument. Wilde wrote his Preface in response to critics who had complained of the immorality of the first edition of his novel, arguing for a version of the principle of “art for art’s sake.”

Wilde’s concept of art for its own sake does seem to be linked to the idea of beauty. He wrote in his Preface, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things…Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all…We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

This sentiment is typical of the Aesthetic Movement in late nineteenth century Britain, which emphasised producing art that was beautiful, rather than having a deeper meaning. This movement is associated with writers and poets like Theophile Gautier and Edgar Allen Poe, as well as artists like James McNeill Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris. Today, one of the most popular works of British Aestheticism is Frederic Leighton’s (c. 1895) Flaming June, a work which I myself find very beautiful.

The Aesthetic Movement was possibly a reaction to the ugliness and materialism of industrialisation and it leaned into the fact that beauty was a necessity in everyday life. The movement brought the ideal of beauty into middle-class homes and it was even hoped that it would blur the division between the ‘fine’ arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and “artisan crafts.” It’s thought that the scandal of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexuality in 1895 discredited the Aesthetic movement, which is ironic given Wilde’s wish to dissociate art and morality.

Even before this, the ideas of the Aesthetic movement had their critics. In his (1897) What is Art? Leo Tolstoy argues that art cannot be isolated from its social context, making him sceptical of the idea of art for art’s sake. Tolstoy refutes the idea that art is solely about beauty. Rather, it is the communication of emotion and should serve a moral purpose and be accessible to the masses.

Art to Make a Point

Much of modern and contemporary art seems to have abandoned or even rebelled against the idea that art must be beautiful. Such works seem to exist to upset our preconceptions or to make a point about the nature of art itself.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is actually a urinal, which Duchamp branded as a “ready-made” sculpture – a mass-produced object presented as art. Philosophers who support the ‘institutional’ theory of art argue that art is not defined by its aesthetic qualities, but by its relationship to the artworld. If a beautiful piece of driftwood is displayed in the same way that a painting or sculpture is displayed, then the driftwood is being used as an artistic medium, then Duchamp’s fountain can be understood in the same way.

René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929) is a painting of a pipe, with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”) below it. Magritte painted a number of word-image paintings in the late 1920s. Magritte and other Surrealist artists set themselves against what they thought of as the “oppressive rationalism of bourgeois society” and Magritte tried to upset the conventions of language and visual representation. His point is that the painting is not a pipe – it is an image of a pipe.

Tracey Emin’s My Bed is not supposed to be beautiful: it is a messy unmade bed with condoms, blood stained underwear, objects like slippers and empty alcohol bottles. Emin made the installation after having spent four days in bed after a breakdown. She moved the bed and all its mess into the gallery space. Her take on why the installation was so influential was that it captured people’s imagination and was a good thing for zeitgeist of the time.

Other friends have told me that they find Emin’s work intriguing because of the way it invites them to interact with it. One of Emin’s other works, her (now destroyed) Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (also known as Tent), was a tent appliqued with 102 names of people she had ever slept with. The names included Emin’s twin brother, her mother and two aborted foetuses as well as an assortment of sexual partners and my friend felt that this, and the way it was possible to crawl right in to the tent encouraged engagement with the piece. Emin herself seems to agree that this was her point. She says, “People went inside the tent. By the time they come out they were thinking of all the people they had slept with - the people they’d been close - to and that’s how the tent worked.”

In some ways, Emin’s work is not so counter-cultural: in the nineteenth century, religious and royal patronage became less common than the marketplace in commissioning art. This made individualism a dominant expectation, leading to the idea held by some modern artists in the twentieth century that art is always autobiographical. Emin’s comments on her Tent echo this sentiment, as she said, “I use me to make the work; if I want to make a painting of a woman, who do I make the painting of? Me.” In Emin’s case, there is an attempt to produce a raw and visceral self-portrait, rather than a beautiful one.

Language Games

As I’ve explained in my previous blog post about Ludwig Wittgenstein, language game theory is the idea that words do not have a single, universal meaning, but depend on context. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein gave the example of the word “games”: “I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?…look and see whether there is anything common to all. - For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.”

On this view, words have similarities and resemblances: a referent of a word may have some, but not all, of the characteristics shared by other referents of the same word. We cannot go outside the game to discover the “real” meaning of words, because there is no single “real” meaning. Words are related by a number of family resemblances.

For me, this doesn’t mean that we have to say that there is no objective reality for language game theory to be useful. I use the approach to avoid the problems of an essentialist definition of religion, for example. It’s a good way for anthropologists and folklorists to ensure that the meaning of words is defined by the people who use them.

Morris Weitz applies this idea to the concept of “art,” arguing that art has no fixed essence and that there is no property common to all works of art – not even beauty. Instead, the concept of art is unified by family resemblances, as Wittgenstein describes.

Stephen Davies objects that Weitz has not demonstrated the impossibility of defining art, as its relevant properties might be imperceptible. In fact, Davies suggests, there is an obvious need for such a definition and even if we do not all agree on it, “we might come to a deeper understanding of art and its context through the pursuit of such a definition.”

Beauty Invoked

Much as I’ve found Wittgenstein’s language games useful in other areas, I’m not ready to unlink the idea of art and beauty. I am ready to think about other kinds of beauty visual arts like painting do not have to contain visual beauty; rather, beauty can be invoked in other ways.

I’m going to appeal to the ideas of Plato, although a proper treatment of Plato’s views on beauty would require a whole blog post in itself (good places to start are his Hippias Major and Symposium). His views about art are also difficult to summarise. Many people are familiar with the idea of censoring poetry in the Republic (377b–398b), and his remarks about mimesis (“imitation” or “representation”) in the arts - but he also encourages the appreciation of the arts (401-403).

The point I do want to mention is Plato’s argument in the Symposium (209a), in which Socrates’ mentor Diotima describes the poet’s task as the begetting of wisdom and other virtues. The poet creates because he desires what is beautiful.

Plato’s treatment of beauty is interesting. Classics Professor Nickolas Pappas points out that the Greek adjective kalon only approximates to the English “beautiful.” In passages like Phaedrus 230b, Plato may speak of a face, body, statue, natural objects or even a spoon that someone finds kalon; at other times, kalon narrowly might mean “noble” or even “admirable.” Plato also calls wisdom beautiful in the Symposium (204b).

Classics scholars seem to think that this concept of beauty is wider than our modern one, but I wonder if that’s really the case. Take Pablo Picasso’s (1903/4) painting The Old Guitarist. The painting itself is not conventionally beautiful, as Picasso used the cold, monochromatic palette and flattened forms of his “blue period.” The figure of the guitarist himself is also not conventionally beautiful, as he is strangely elongated and uncomfortably cramped. Yet there is beauty in the painting. Picasso himself had been living in poverty and some see in the painting the artist’s empathy for the downtrodden, blind man. Others see Picasso’s great admiration for the sixteenth century artist El Greco in the guitarist’s elongated form. Yet others find beauty in the guitarist’s devotion to his instrument, or the empathy that the painting itself creates in the viewer.

I’ve written previously about my special relationship with Ingres’ (1832) portrait of Louis François Bertin, which I myself find very beautiful. This is not because the sitter is handsome (indeed, his family were dismayed at Bertin’s appearance in the portrait), but rather because of the great sense of calm and reassurance I feel when looking at the painting. Knowing about Bertin’s kindness towards Ingres when the painter broke down under the pressure of the portrait right makes the painting seem even more beautiful.

One final point: I find myself being willing to overlook the lack of visual beauty in a painting that has a beautiful significance. In my blog post about the art history of Siena, I noted that the Madonna of the Big Eyes that once stood in Siena’s Duomo is not conventionally beautiful. It is special, though, having worked a miracle by protecting the desperate citizens of Siena in a battle against the Florentines. The painting was replaced by Duccio’s (now dispersed but much more spectacular) Maestà – but the beauty of the Madonna of the Big Eyes’ relationship with Siena goes beyond what we see on the panel.

Find out more

Our History and Art History blog has a series on Art History! Dr. Orton has written posts on the botanical illustrations of Enlightenment entomologist Maria Sybilla Merian, Joris Hoefnagel’s botanical illuminations, Ingres’ portrait of Louis-Francois Bertin and the Art History of Siena! She also has a post on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and more philosophical topics on our Philosophy blog.

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