Part 3: Why Have We Learned to Distrust Beauty?
After spending so much time thinking about kitsch, I began to suspect that I had been asking the wrong question.
The first part of this series explored what kitsch might be. The second asked whether different cultures even mean the same thing when they use the word. Yet both discussions gradually led me towards a different and rather uncomfortable thought. Perhaps the real issue is not kitsch at all. Perhaps the real issue is beauty.
More specifically, perhaps the question we should be asking is this: why have we become so suspicious of beauty?
The question sounds strange at first. After all, beauty remains one of the most desired qualities in human life. We travel across continents to admire beautiful cities. We preserve beautiful buildings. We photograph beautiful landscapes and surround ourselves with objects we find beautiful. Entire industries are built upon our attraction to beauty. Yet the moment beauty enters a conversation about art, something curious happens. The atmosphere changes. Admiration becomes cautious. Beauty suddenly seems to require a defence.
A painting may be beautiful, but what is it really saying? A photograph may be beautiful, but where is the concept? A sculpture may be beautiful, but is it challenging enough? Again and again, beauty appears to find itself standing trial.
This would have puzzled much of the Western tradition. For the ancient Greeks, beauty was not the opposite of truth. It was often considered one of its expressions. Harmony, proportion and beauty were signs that reality possessed an underlying order. Medieval builders did not construct cathedrals despite their beauty. Their beauty was part of their purpose. Renaissance artists such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael did not regard beauty as decoration. Beauty was a way of understanding the world and humanity’s place within it.
Even the Romantic movement, with all its emphasis on emotion and individual experience, rarely treated beauty with suspicion. Mountains, sunsets, roses, ruins and beloved faces were not considered trivial subjects. They were regarded as worthy of artistic attention precisely because they had the power to move people.
At some point, however, this confidence began to fade. The twentieth century confronted Europe and North America with industrialisation, war, political upheaval and profound social change. Many artists felt that traditional forms were no longer capable of expressing the reality they faced. Beauty sometimes appeared inadequate. Harmony seemed suspiciously comfortable. Art increasingly sought to provoke, disturb and challenge.
The impulse was understandable. Some of the most important artistic achievements of the modern era emerged from precisely this desire. Yet every cultural correction contains a danger. What begins as an expansion of possibilities can gradually harden into a new expectation. Over time, beauty seemed to lose some of its former confidence. In certain artistic circles it became something that had to justify its existence.
One can still feel the consequences today. When someone stands before a painting and says, “It’s beautiful,” the statement often sounds incomplete, as though something more sophisticated ought to follow. Beauty alone appears insufficient. The work must also be ironic, political, disruptive, conceptual or intellectually demanding. Curiously, we apply this standard almost nowhere else. Nobody stands before a sunset and complains that it lacks social relevance. Nobody visits a Gothic cathedral and criticises it for being excessively harmonious. Nobody accuses a rose of avoiding difficult questions. Yet works of art are frequently subjected to precisely these demands.
Perhaps this helps explain why accusations of kitsch so often attach themselves to beautiful things. Beauty is immediate. It requires no specialised knowledge. One does not need a degree in art history to recognise the appeal of a rose, the elegance of a well-designed building or the emotional force of a successful portrait. Beauty reaches people directly, and directness has become strangely suspect.
We often assume that what is difficult must be deeper than what is immediate. Complexity becomes associated with intelligence, while accessibility is associated with simplification. The result is a cultural climate in which beauty sometimes appears guilty until proven innocent. Yet difficulty and depth are not the same thing. A work can be obscure without being profound, just as it can be beautiful without being superficial.
At this point, Jeff Koons enters the conversation. Few contemporary artists have been accused of kitsch more frequently. Yet Koons has consistently defended pleasure, attraction and delight as legitimate human experiences. Again and again, he returns to a question that many critics seem reluctant to ask: why are we embarrassed by what we enjoy?
One does not need to admire his work to recognise the force of that question. Perhaps we have become so accustomed to suspicion that we mistake it for depth. Perhaps criticism feels more intelligent than admiration. It is easy to identify flaws. Flaws are everywhere. It is often far more demanding to explain why something succeeds.
The problem becomes particularly interesting when we turn to representations of the human body. Consider the highly polished world of fashion photography, advertising and glamour imagery. Few visual genres are subjected to more contradictory expectations. They are expected to be attractive but not superficial, technically accomplished but not merely decorative, emotionally engaging but not sentimental.
The classic Playboy centrefold provides an interesting example. Whatever one thinks of the publication itself, many of those images displayed extraordinary technical skill. Lighting, styling, composition, printing and retouching were often executed at an exceptionally high level. Does technical mastery automatically create art? Clearly not. If it did, the discussion would end there. Yet dismissing such work entirely also feels inadequate. The relationship between art, craftsmanship and kitsch has never been straightforward. A work can be technically brilliant and intellectually shallow. It can be technically simple and profoundly moving. It can be beautiful without being kitsch, and kitsch without being entirely worthless.
As a photographer, I encounter the same dilemma in a different form. Roses appear frequently in my work. Few symbols have been used more often throughout the history of art. Poets have written about them. Painters have painted them. Photographers have photographed them. Florists sell them by the millions. Greeting cards have relied upon them for generations.
When a subject is repeated often enough, something inevitable happens. Eventually we stop seeing the rose itself. We begin seeing all the other roses that came before it. We see advertising campaigns, Valentine’s Day cards, decorative prints and familiar clichés. The subject becomes a victim of its own success. Yet does that automatically make it worthless?
I do not believe so.
A rose remains capable of carrying meaning. It can become a symbol of love, mortality, memory, beauty or loss. It can participate in tradition or challenge it. It can feel profound or sentimental depending on how it is used and how it is seen. The same may be true of many subjects that routinely attract accusations of kitsch: angels, sunsets, love poems, beautiful faces and the human body itself. Perhaps the problem is not the subject. Perhaps the problem is our familiarity with it. We have encountered these images so often that we sometimes forget why they moved people in the first place.
This brings me back to the beginning of this journey, and to those two angels by Raphael hanging above a hotel bed in Treviso. At first, the fleeting impression that they might somehow be kitsch seemed almost absurd. Yet that moment eventually led to a much larger question, one that stretches far beyond Raphael, beyond roses and even beyond kitsch itself.
Perhaps the most important question is not what kitsch is.
Perhaps it is why beauty so often finds itself under suspicion.
Beauty is not automatically synonymous with truth. It can seduce, manipulate and deceive. History offers countless examples of beautiful things placed in the service of questionable causes. Yet beauty can also comfort, inspire, connect and reveal. The problem is not beauty itself, but our tendency to treat it either as inherently virtuous or inherently suspect.
Perhaps the challenge facing contemporary art is not to avoid beauty. Perhaps it is to take beauty seriously again. Not naively. Not uncritically. But without the reflexive distrust that so often accompanies it today.
For if we learn to distrust every beautiful thing, we risk losing something that has accompanied humanity for thousands of years: the ability to be moved before we begin to analyse.
And perhaps every great work of art begins precisely there.