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Only a Promise of Beauty: The Place of Beauty in the World of Art (2007)

This book is an attempt to return beauty to the center of philosophical discourse, where it resided until the rise of Modernism. Mr. Nehemas associates beauty with desire or, more properly, desirability. It is in this sense that beauty offers a "promise of happiness"--that is we could possess the object that we desire we might be happy.

He contrasts this ancient understanding of visual appeal with the Modernist notion--that Tom Wolfe has so memorably demolished--that beauty is something to be explained to the viewer rather than generated by his observation:

Often self-consciously difficult, the modernist arts shifted the burden on communication from the work of art to its audience. It was no longer the work that had to attract its audience and bring it around, but the audience itself that became responsible for taking the initiative and making an effort to understand it and establish its value--a value that, since the work was seldom immediately appealing, must for a certain length of time be taken for granted. Genuine value is not obvious pleasure: the obvious is common.

The advantages of such an asinine construction are as obvious as the beauty it denies:
(1) It relieves artists of the difficulty of actually creating beautiful works. Indeed, the crappier your effort the better because that will simply require the critics, patrons and audiences to work all the harder to unravel the unobvious value. Not for nothing did Joyce say, "The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." The fact that his works had no value became their chief selling point. It is the explanation that matters, not the art.

(2) It allowed artists to claim for themselves the same inscrutability that scientists had achieved as their theories became ever more complex. After all, where once a solitary figure like a Goethe could be said to know everything that could be known in his own time, in the modern age Richard Feynman (or whichever physicist) could say: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum physics." Who would be a professor of the Humanities if every Tom, Dick and Mary can read a book or look at a painting and tell whether it is beautiful or not, when a few buildings away a Biology or Physics professor is conveying gnosticism?

(3) It's just good for sales. As Wolfe asks in Bauhaus: "O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within they blessed borders today?" Get the folks who spend the money to suspend their own capacities for judgment about what is beautiful and soon they're buying urinals for millions. Sure, the public gets the jokes, but the emperors are pissing away their money on your new clothes.

Ironically, Wolfe makes the case in simpler prose than Mr. Nehemas, who dresses it up in more academically philosophical garb, but props for the effort.

(Reviewed:05-Dec-20)

Grade: (C)

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Nietzsche was thought to have a very bad life because he was completely ignored, he was very sick most of his life, he had continuous migraines, he never found a woman he could marry, he was in love with a woman but she wasn’t interested in him, he had very few friends and had not very much money. So people say, his work is great but his life is terrible. We define the life as everything but the work — and I think that’s a really terrible mistake. But if you include in the life writing all these magnificent books and having all those incredible ideas, is that a bad life? I think that in a way is what happiness may be. Feeling “that’s me” in your work, I think that’s one of the greatest feelings you can have — ever.

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Only a Promise of Beauty: The Place of Beauty in the World of Art (2007)

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