> FEATURES 02

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) 1981

Dave Beech argues that beauty is

political not despite the fact that it
feels subjective but precisely because
it feels subjective

The Politics of Beauty

AVANTGARDISM INTERRUPTED THE HISTORICAL LINK BETWEEN ART AND BEAUTY.
IN RECASTING BEAUTY AS IDEOLOGICALLY COMPLICIT WITH POLITICAL POWER,
WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY CULTIVATING A SENSITIVITY TO THE REPRESSED VALUE
OF UGLINESS, AVANTGARDISM POLITICISED BEAUTY.
To see beauty as politically loaded is to brand private, subjective
likes and dislikes as unintentional carriers of coded social information.
Today, of course, this kind of political and social inscription (whether understood in terms of ideology, the social
function of cultural distinction, suspicion about art’s institutions, the question of elitism or the social history of art and
taste) is common currency, but it is a specifically modern conception.
Ancient, classical, medieval, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers did not trouble themselves about how soci-
ety weaves its way through our intimate experiences. The history of the emergence of this modern conception of
socially inscribed behaviour is charted by Michael Rosen in his book On Voluntary Servitude where he argues that after

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Marcel Duchamp
Fountain 1917
the 18th Century, society was seen for the first time as
an active, behaviour-forming system or machine in
which individual belief and conduct are explained as
functional for or produced by society.
What is characteristic of premodern thinking is the
conviction that society is simply the aggregate of indi-
vidual choices and actions. However, Adam Smith’s
‘invisible hand’ and Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ initiat-
ed a new conception of how individual actions were
inextricably tied up with a greater whole. These were
faint promises of what was to come – a fully fledged
theory of the ways in which society infiltrates the
thoughts, feelings and actions of individuals in even
the most private and subjective experiences.
Paul Ricoeur calls this modern interpretation of the
relationship between the individual and society the
‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. It was inaugurated, he says,
by the works of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Ideology,
the unconscious and the ‘will-to-power’ share a vital
theoretical commitment to structures beyond the indi-
vidual which decisively shape subjectivity itself. As a
result, statements made by individuals about their inten-
tions, beliefs and conduct cannot be accepted uncritical-
ly. Rather, the suspicion is that individuals are inevitably
prey to forces that they cannot control – forces of which
they are often entirely unaware.
When avantgardism took up the hermeneutics of
suspicion in its diverse forms of cultural dissent, the
resistance to beauty was part and parcel of the resis-
tance to bourgeois culture generally. ‘Except in strug-
gle, there is no more beauty’, wrote FT Marinetti in
the 1905 Futurist Manifesto. Likewise, the Dadaist
Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes put the Avant Garde’s
antipathy to beauty in stark terms: ‘One is no longer
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concerned with knowing whether a thing is beautiful
or ugly; whether it is logical, probable or fanciful – we
pursue the ugly … And for the sake of strategy, since
we must always be on the alert to avoid backsliding
into habits which had become natural in the course of
a long tradition – to prevent the beautiful, the noble,
the exalted, the charming, the well-ordered, the per-
fect from catching the beast by the tail.’
The two most thoroughgoing avant-garde critiques
of beauty come from the leading thinkers of Dada and
Surrealism respectively, Marcel Duchamp and André
Breton. Duchamp’s rules for selecting the Ready-
mades, which he reported to be chosen according to
complete visual indifference, deliberately left no room
for beauty in art. Breton’s theory of ‘convulsive beauty’
took a different tack, violating the boundaries of tradi-
tional beauty with an intense experience of the object
based on the hysteric rather than the aesthete.
Art after avantgardism tended to preserve the
Avant Garde’s suspicion of beauty even when its
politicisation had been cooled. Clement Greenberg,
for instance, preferred to talk about works being
‘good’ or ‘successful’ rather than ‘beautiful’. After
that, Pop was vulgar, Minimalism was literal, Concep-
tual Art was opposed to the visual and Postmodernism
was either more interested in the sublime or regarded
beauty as one of art’s institutionalised discourses.
So, when Dave Hickey argued that the concept of
beauty could be revived as a meaningful term for art
criticism in the late 80s and early 90s, he was pit-
ting himself against the entire history of Modernism
and avantgardism, as well as the academics and
curators of contemporary art’s institutions that he
explicitly attacked. Unimpressed by the history of the
politicisation of beauty, Hickey complains in his
1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on
Beauty, ‘if you broached the issue of beauty in the
American art world of 1988, you … ignited a conver-
sation about the market’.
Hickey seemed to be stumped by the idea that
artists, curators and writers might be wary of beauty,
and makes no mention whatsoever of the history of
avantgardism that animates the modern nervousness
towards beauty. While it is not true that the art market
was the source of the problem of beauty in art, I
would suggest that the politicisation of beauty left
beauty nowhere else to go.
Hickey’s response to the contemporary art world’s
overwhelming resistance to beauty in the 80s was to
switch the blame from the market (which he regards
as wholly benevolent) to art’s institutions (which he
despises in their every detail) and swap the problem
from that of beauty itself to the exclusion of beauty.
Hickey doesn’t blame artists for what he sees as the
underestimation of beauty in art; he blames art’s pub-
lic institutions and the academic bureaucrats who he
imagines set the agenda according to their own nar-
row self-interests.
Amelia Jones, identifying herself as ‘just the type
of “art professional” Hickey would surely excoriate’,
defends the critique of beauty by historicising and

contextualising ‘beauty discourse’ in her 2002 book
Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Jones roots out the
‘colonialist, sexist, and heterosexist assumptions’ of
beauty discourse, insisting that the rhetoric of beauty
‘merely veils privilege’.
Although Hickey’s ‘vernacular beauty’ is meant to
have ‘democratic appeal’, Jones is concerned ‘to interro-
gate the particular exclusions that are at work in any dis-
course that naturalizes “beauty”’, seeing in the logic of
aesthetic judgements of this type not a direct route
between artwork and individual, but a historically, politi-
cally and culturally suffused product of social division
and inequality. Beauty, in such circumstances, has to be
loaded. And no less so than when its privileges are inter-
nalised to the point of invisibility.
As it stands, Jones’s complaint against Hickey has a
lot to recommend it, specifically the central conviction of
the hermeneutics of suspicion that the social inscribes
itself into individual conduct and that it is therefore
socially produced. And yet, Jones’s critique expresses
this modern predicament too forcefully – in too deter-
ministic a fashion. Beauty is not simply a cryptic double
for privilege, exclusion and power.
The hermeneutics of suspicion does not thereby
merely replace talk about individuals with talk about
society (a hermeneutics of social certainties); it draws
out the tension between individual experience and
the social structure. This tension is played out in the
contemporary debate over beauty as it is mapped in
James Elkins’ Art History Versus Aesthetics. Over and
over again, a tug-of-war is staged between those who,
like Hickey, are interested in individual aesthetic
experience, and those, like Jones, who want to his-
toricise and contextualise individual experience
socially and politically.
Similarly, at one end, contemporary Adornian philo-
sophical aesthetics endorses aesthetic judgement against
the social critique of art, while, at the other end, the cri-
tique of the beauty industry sees the individual’s insecu-
rities as exploited for profit.
In fact, the whole debate on beauty and aesthetics
today is best understood as revolving around the tension
between the individual and society. The point is not to take
sides but to rethink the question of beauty and debates on
the aesthetic as rooted in the fundamental tensions, divi-
sions and structures of modern, capitalist society.
Modernity is characterised, in Max Weber’s terms,
by disenchantment, rationalisation and bureaucracy.
Standardisation, efficiency, methodicalness and hard
work combine in modernity to produce what Weber,
in his 1904-05 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, called the ‘specific and peculiar rational-
ism of Western culture’.
Weber sees this rationalisation embedded primari-
ly within the two dominant social structures of mod-
ern society – the capitalist economy and its state.
According to Weber, individuals within such enter-
prises and institutions do not just happen to act
instrumentally, they are obliged to do so. Which is
why Weber describes the fate of the modern individ-
ual as constrained by the rationality of economic
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> FEATURES 02
>> The whole debate on beauty and
aesthetics today is best understood as
revolving around the tension between the
individual and society. The point is not to
take sides but to rethink the question of
beauty and debates on the aesthetic as
rooted in the fundamental tensions,
divisions and structures of modern,
capitalist society.
acquisition as if by an ‘iron cage’, which Adorno later
rechristened the ‘totally administered society’.
Rational calculation structures the actions, events
and things in the modern world, ultimately including
the consciousness, feelings and pleasures of those who
live in it. The key social relations of modern life – buy-
ers and sellers, managers and workers, experts and
clients, and so on – bring individuals together through
anonymous processes of organisation, mediated by
forms of rationality. Even the care industries are
accounted for, monitored and managed in a unitised,
anonymous and instrumental manner.
Rather than detecting these social forces behind
the back of beauty, therefore, we can expect beauty
itself to be transformed internally by the rise of disen-
chantment, rationalisation and bureaucracy and the
historical marginalisation of ritual, myth, metaphysics
and magic. This is why, for instance, Modernism
either eliminated or streamlined beauty to steer clear
of the suspiciously decorative.
Stripped of traditional relations and forms of com-
munity, the bulk of modern sociality is markedly asocial.
Competition, rivalry, antagonism, instrumentality and
exploitation are characteristic of the salient structural
relations of contemporary society. Not only does subjec-
tivity adapt to such conditions; it is also turned into an
object of instrumental reason.
Kant’s philosophy of beauty stands uncomfortably
at the cusp of this modern world, no longer able to
presume the individual subject’s asocial sovereignty,
Kant labours to regulate a space for uncorrupted sub-
jectivity by identifying all the major threats to it and
then systematically eliminating them from aesthetic
judgement properly conducted. For Kant, the subjec-
tive was, if adequately protected, a route to universali-
ty, but for alienated modern social life, the subjective
was now framed by a peculiarly asocial version of
social life.
Beauty’s version of modern asociality is fully formed
when its function is to express cultural and social dis-
tinctions as natural or subjective ones. To perpetuate
this ideological fiction requires a concept of the subject
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that seems to exist independently of social forces – one
that can be universalised without suspicion. Historically,
this subjective position has belonged to those who
regard their taste as educated, cultivated and true. Only
those who benefit from the cultural profits of aesthetic
distinction have an interest in the fiction that beauty
originates in subjective judgement and culminates in
universal taste. That is known in economics as securing
a monopoly for one’s own private interests.
Beauty might seem like something that we know
when we see it, but the hermeneutics of suspicion
refers such experiences to hidden motives, unintended
consequences, structural conditions and spurious
rationalisations – in short, the economies of taste. We
continue to see beauty around us but this can no
longer be the kind of elevated experience that might
stand outside ordinary disputes, hierarchies and ten-
sions. I want to call this historical process the seculari-
sation of beauty.
The philosophy of beauty from Plato to Kant may
have been ethically charged, but it did not theorise
how individual pleasures, choices and tastes are
always unwittingly charged with social content. Beau-
ty becomes secular through the same historical
process by which art sheds its aura. As social rela-
tions take on an anonymous, mechanised and
abstract manner, beauty itself becomes subject to
rationality, commodity exchange and calculation.
Beauty gets tied up with design, style and marketing.
Losing its innocence in this way, beauty comes to feel
saccharine or even violent. At the same time beauty
loses its advantage over vulgarity, primitivism, func-
tionalism or any number of beauty’s rivals. Within
Modernism, beauty has no more to recommend it
than the chaotic, the accidental, the miserable, the
ruined or the overlooked.
Beauty has become utterly contentious. Instead of
being an aesthetic category of experience in which sub-
jective feelings of pleasure are expressed, beauty has
been fragmented – no judgement of beauty can be made
without it being compared with equivalent judgements
made by people with different racial, gender, class or cul-
tural inscriptions. This is why the secularisation of beau-
ty is necessarily and irreversibly also the politicisation of
Child, 2002 © the artist 2007
David Shrigley, Strange Toy for Strange
Cult Fiction – Art
and the Comic Book
4 May – 1 July
Suzanne Treister –
HEXEN 2039
27 April – 8 July
8 306 / ART MONTHLY / 5.07
beauty. No single code or measure of beauty can be
asserted because this would always be thought of, within
the modern conditions associated with the hermeneutics
of suspicion, as privileging one sector of society or one
culture over all others.
If this leads to aesthetic relativism, that is only
because the covert social processes that have made
beauty seem to be singular and universal have at last
been made transparent and open to critique. But we
need to be clear about something: Hickey’s revival of
beauty would not liberate anybody from the estab-
lished regime of intellectual taste if, as was the case
before avantgardism, art’s institutions were dominat-
ed by an authorised version of beauty. What is more,
Hickey’s liberatory version of beauty, which seems to
place the individual in an unmediated relation to the
artwork, would only be possible if (and only if) indi-
viduals derived their tastes, feelings and pleasures
entirely spontaneously, subjectively and asocially – ie
in ways that seemed natural before the 18th Century
and became naïve and improbable thereafter.
Modern social relations bring about two contradic-
tory conceptions of beauty: one is the conviction that it
is a purely private, subjective experience; and the other
is that beauty, like all subjective experiences, is socially
inscribed. Each, in effect, represents one side of the
tension between individual and society that structures
modern capitalism. To choose one of them is to fail to
see how beauty has been transformed immanently by
the forces of modern alienation.
Our understanding of beauty can no longer assume
(or insist on) the individual’s autonomy to make
judgements without unintended consequences or to
take pleasure without risking structural and ideologi-
cal complicity and culpability. At the same time, the
reduction of the individual to the social does not ade-
quately register the modern tension between individ-
ual and society. Beauty is political not despite the fact
that it feels subjective but precisely because it feels
subjective. Beauty enters us into a world of dispute,
contention and conflict at the very moment when we
feel ourselves to be at ease. ❚
DAVE BEECH is an artist.
Paula Rego’s Epstein’s Rock Drill
Nursery Rhymes until 30 September
Until 20 May
Lucian Freud
Guest Star Portraits and Andrew Tift
Rolf Harris – ‘Portrait of Kitty’
Her Majesty, 1948 – 2006
The Queen 2005 26 May – 2 September
28 April – 10 June
The New Art Gallery Walsall
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Walsall WS2 8 LG
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