Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (review)

In 1948 Barnett Newman famously—or notoriously—said that the impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty. More recently, Jake Chapman has said that conceptual art challenges the idea that it is the job of the work of art to create objects of transcendent beauty. The work of the Chapman brothers, in a way never imagined by Barnett Newman, certainly aims to rid us of any sentiments toward a work of art which might offer any hope of beauty. But this book challenges such negative conceptions of art and beauty. Drawing from his work in classical philosophy and analytic aesthetics Alexander Nehamas intriguingly seeks to combine a Platonic conception of beauty as the object of love and desire, with a Kantian account of aesthetic judgment in which critical judgment requires personal attention to the unique particularity of the object of aesthetic interest. In endorsing these ideas however, he rejects both Plato's metaphysical picture of the world as an intelligible realm of unchanging objects, and, crucially, Kant's insistence on disinterest and universalisability as central criteria of the aesthetic. For in neither of these senses is beauty objective. Nehamas does agree with Kant that pleasure in the beautiful is not entirely subjective or private, for as something which needs to be communicated with others, it is essentially social. But what we have in common is not, as Kant thought, a theoretical ability to find beauty in the same things as everyone else, rather, it is a practical need to find, like everyone, beauty in something. Beauty, he says, is provoked by love and, for better or worse, love can be provoked by anything. For Nehamas aesthetic judgment can never command universal agreement. He says that a world in which everyone did agree would be "a nightmare, a desolate, desperate world" (83). Nehamas's main target however, is that modernist post-Kantian conception of the aesthetic, evident in the writings of Clement Greenberg and others, which seeks to isolate the beautiful from all the sensual, practical, and ethical issues which were at the center of Plato's concern. Thus he is emphatically at odds with what Arthur Danto claims, in his book The Abuse of Beauty, to be the great lesson of modernism: "The discovery that something can be good art without being beautiful[is] one of the great conceptual clarifications of twentieth-century philosophy of art" (21). Such claims as this, says Nehamas, depend on one of the central characteristics of modernism, namely, the detachment of beauty, conceived merely in terms of sense and appearance, from value in art, the discernment of which requires critical intelligence. It is in this way, he says, that beauty has been wrenched from aesthetic value.

Nehamas reveals his own position about the relationship between art and beauty through reference to a wide variety of different works of art—mainly paintings but also novels and fleeting references to his preferred television series—culminating in an extended discussion of Manet's Olympia. He reports his own enduring engagement with this work and offers an explanation of the ambiguity of Olympia's gaze, a gaze which "acknowledges the viewer precisely as it ignores him, attracting him with a secret it insists on keeping back" (116). By aligning his particular descriptions of artworks with an account of the beauty we find in friends and lovers, he aims to show how beauty is inextricably connected with appearance and desire. For just as the visual features we are attracted to in people are informed by our beliefs about their character, so it is with the work of art. Appearance can be the opening into our awareness of the beauty of someone by leading us to further expectation about their personality and attitude, expectations which may or may not be fulfilled. Similarly, the immediate pleasures we might find in a painting, in whatever qualities we recognize as being directly...