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

Nehamas contends—against the likes of Schopenhauer—that far from drawing us out of the world, beauty leads us to greater involvement in it: a beautiful work of art, like a beautiful person, makes us want to have it in our lives, to understand it better. Of the many instances Nehamas marshals in this readable, erudite, intimate polemic, the most extensively elaborated is his own fascination with Manet's Olympia, which induced him "to learn about, among other things, the institution of the salon, the history of art criticism, the social structure of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, and the connections between prostitution and the working class at that time." Alas for the persuasiveness of his main thesis, Nehamas (who most blames modernism for the divorce of beauty from everyday life) ignores one of the key distinctions upon which the modernist revolution in values turned—that between beauty and interestingness. Why has Olympia occupied him more than other paintings, if not because it is intensely interesting as well as beautiful? Nehamas might answer that our tendency to separate the beautiful from the interesting is just what has led us astray, but such a response might not speak to the way most people experience beauty. There are many things whose beauty I find myself content to enjoy in passing—and without wishing to know more.