Topics Beauty

Question What, if anything, distinguishes natural beauty from artistic beauty?

Accepted:
December 2, 2005

Comments

I don't think that natural beauty and artistic beauty are fundamentallydistinct, but the beauty of art often depends on representation in away that the beauty of natural objects does not. Works of art can bebeautiful because of what they represent. For example, a portrait orlandscape painting might be beautiful in large part because of thebeauty of that which is depicted. But they may also be beautifulbecause of the way thatthey represent. So, for example, it is possible for a painting to bebeautiful even though it depicts anobject or event that is not beautiful. There are, for example,beautiful paintings that depict scenesof great suffering, which we would not count as beautiful (e.g., somebeautiful paintings that depict St. Sebastian's martyrdom). Or considersome famous paintings of ordinary objects (Cezanne's still lifes) orordinary scenes (Vermeer's). We might be hesitant to describe thoseobjects or scenes as beautiful, even though the paintings of them arepretty central cases of beauty. And that these paintings representseems relevant to their beauty. So the beauty of much art has to dowith its capacity for representation. (Much, but not all. Some ofthe beauty of art--such as the beauty of some purely instrumentalmusic--has very little to do with representation.) This is not thecase with natural beauty. The beauty of flowers, trees, sunsets,landscapes, bodies of water, rock formations, sunrises, etc. does notdepend on representation, because those things do not represent.

Question What, if anything, distinguishes natural beauty from artistic beauty? Accepted:December 2, 2005

Question What, if anything, distinguishes natural beauty from artistic beauty?

Accepted:
December 2, 2005