Art inherits a primary mission for humanity, which is to incite it to love and peace.
For the record…
Beauty and art were brutally separated
by Marcel Duchamp with his urinal (see Fontaine). Not all artistic work,
however interesting, necessarily relates to
the experience of beauty.
We have a filter that separates the ugly from the beautiful, with the information sent to different regions of the brain.
Neurobiologist Semir Zeki states that beauty is desire and love, and
that there is a mirror association with beauty. When people look at a person or
object they desire, they use the same pathway as for beauty. So there is a common area of activity localised in the medial orbitofrontal cortex; these areas are activated when one experiences
beauty, but they are also sometimes active
when a person looks at individuals of whom they are really fond.
Contextual deviations in a society in
crisis
Today, deviations and confusions are to be avoided. Amalgamations have
become common, and these shortcuts reflect the dysfunction of our societies.
- I note that beauty is sometimes
perceived by some people as being reserved for the rich, and this makes art a mark of division
between social categories. Studies of a population living in poor ANRU[1] zones show that disadvantaged social
categories want to break away from this rule, because they do not want to be
associated with a social marker that presents them as belonging to a dominated class. The vast majority of people living in these areas
want the same benefits as the better-off classes.
- Some of us feel that if there is an 80% of women in artists’ works,
and beautiful women at that, this is the mark of a reduction in the status of women, with them
being reduced to the role of women as
objects. People sometimes do not know how a human being functions. All neuroscientists agree on this, but I
would like to quote Anjan Chatterjee who explains in his talk “How your brain decides
what is beautiful”, that a person who is considered
beautiful is associated with a person who has qualities and values. For
example, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of
Venus is an allegory of female beauty and purity. The recognition of beauty
leads us to see the person as more intelligent, as having more values and
common sense, as being deeper and more perfect…
In our appraisal, they will have more inner qualities
than others.
Art must contribute to a better world
The people involved in some way in the art world represent 2% of the
population. These players sometimes consider beauty to be an embellishment that hides the substance: it can be
considered superficial, while bad taste, kitsch, is a claim that has remained
very present in the art world. The art world has banned the word ‘beautiful’,
but it has remained in the dictionary and in the collective consciousness. The
study Art, Aesthetics and the Brain by the neuroscientists Helmut Leder
and Marcos Nadal mentions that people who observe works of art associate them
with their reference to beauty. Contrary to what Kasimir Malevich thought when
he painted his Black square
on a white background,
the work is not the subject, but the subject is the effect it produces in the
viewer.
In conclusion, Semi Zeki explains that
beauty activates the same areas as love and desire, and that our brain couples these together.
Art therefore inherits a primary mission for humanity, which is to promote love
and peace.
When Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will
save the world”, he hit the
nail on the head: artists must make the world more beautiful to help spread
love and joy, but also to strengthen our will to live and our ability to
survive events.
[1] ANRU: Agence nationale pour la
rénovation urbaine (National
Agency for Urban Renewal),
which has the general goal
of backing
comprehensive urban projects to transform disadvantaged neighbourhoods in
depth.
05-05-2023 - Guillaume Bottazzi
