The Gift as Art: An Interview with Stephen David Ross - Pt. 6

  James Coignard, "Lecteur au bord de mer", Mischtechnik auf Leinwand 1990, 130 x 162 cm. Boisseree  "The art work impregnates the space it inhabits, its depth, its volume of conscious and unconscious experiences with a sense of reality, without which we would never be able to recognize the real world (Pleynet, p. 30)."

Rick Visser:  The need to be authoritative seems to be at the root of many of our difficulties in both philosophy and art.  I am constantly impressed with how immensely strong this impulse is in all of us!  Let me ask you a further question about beauty:  Arthur Danto said recently that Dada demonstrates that something can be art without being beautiful.  At an earlier time, Malraux said something similar:  "Modern art was doubtlessly born on the day when the idea of art and that of beauty were separated."   You wrote a book titled, ‘The Gift of Beauty: The Good as Art” at a time (1996) when the relationship between beauty and art had already become questionable and, in many cases, had simply dissolved or was of little interest to many artists.  Do you agree that art and beauty have, to a significant degree, parted ways in the last ninety years or so?  Or, is the situation more in line with Agnes Martin’s thought that all art is about beauty even when it is not about beauty; that when it is not about beauty, it is a response to the lack of beauty in the world?

Stephen David Ross:  Beauty has always been interpreted in the two ways I described: as consummatory, fulfilling, and as transfigurative, excessive. Even to the Greeks, and in other cultures as well, there have always been a sense of beauty closer to the grand, fulfilling, proportionate, and complete, and another closer to the unbounded, infinite, transfigurative, uncanny. Sometimes these have been described in terms of the beautiful and the sublime. Sometimes they have been understood to pertain to art, aesthetics, and beauty in unclassifiable ways. One reason is that the discourse and experience of art is frequently beyond words, beyond categories, a secular expression of infinity. So one might employ Levinas's terms: a sense of beauty in being much closer to totality, and a sense of beauty beyond being, excessive, closer to infinity. Infinity here is beyond comprehension, intelligibility, classification, and sensibility. The point is that art and aesthetics and sometimes nature present us with experiences beyond our ability to know and to grasp them. And yet we can grasp and know and experience that.

My writing on gifts and giving has been an exploration of the possibility of thinking and experiencing beyond the ways in which we insist on having, not only property and things but knowledge, truth, and values. Can we think, can we live, in terms of giving and generosity beyond and exceeding possessing and grasping? In The Gift of Beauty, I meant to link this sense of dispossession and unhaving with art, understanding beauty there as closer to dispossession than to consummation. To Danto's suggestion that something can be art without being beautiful, I would say, more provocatively, there is beauty in art and nature and human life without being beautiful, without being complete, formed, and satisfying. There is beauty in downright ugly things and places. Indeed, recent art‑‑and I hope, some recent philosophy‑‑have shown that the two sides of beauty can be brought into a relation that is more beautiful, more generous, more disruptive, and more fulfilling than either alone. Here beauty is not one pole of a binary with the ugly or the sublime but beyond any binary, thereby calling every binary, every opposition into question. That is what I understand Diotima to tell Socrates in words frequently read in terms of divine and unchanging being:

He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, . . . when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty . . . a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation or in another place foul, as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for example in an animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever‑growing and perishing beauties of all other things. (Plato, Symposium, 210‑211a [Jowett trans.])

Not so much eternity as a beauty that displaces every boundary and separation. In this sense beauty is everywhere, everything is beautiful, everything is aesthetic, everything matters in its ways. And we may live so. And love so. It is also what I mean by ethics.

In this sense, I would say that all art, and all life and thought, answer to the demand for beauty in terms of questions more than answers, in terms of what is not yet, what remains to come, what has not been thought, not been felt, is possible, and impossible. Art, aesthetics, beauty, but also goodness and truth, face us with questions, and more questions, questions before, and questions after. Beauty is one name for an infinite multiplicity of questions, an infinite multiplicity of possibilities, experiences, and meanings. So are goodness and truth. What we do not know, have not yet experienced, what exceeds our expectations, is unfamiliar and strange, remains yet to come: this is beauty, is presented by art‑‑and just as frequently betrayed; it is also ethical, that to which we must answer‑‑other people, other experiences, possibilities yet to arrive; it is also political‑‑community, democracy, sociality, peace, ways of living that we do not know how to accomplish; and it is philosophical, epistemological‑‑ways of thinking, forms of truth, we have not begun to imagine.

I do not think the world lacks beauty. I think there is beauty everywhere. And more to come. I do not think we should expect to know what it is or to grasp its limits.

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