The Trouble With Beauty

By Alastair Gordon

“Beauty may be the way goodness becomes visible to us.” —Hans Urs von Balthasar

If you know me, you’ll know that much of my time is spent helping run an artist residency program in East London.

This week, in our residency studios, we had a hearty discussion about the nature of beauty in art. Nothing too ambitious then for a Monday morning. While most people were easing themselves gently into the week with a coffee and a glance at their inbox, we were attempting to solve one of the longest-running debates in Western philosophy. It seemed a perfectly reasonable use of time.

Every Monday we host something resembling a pop-up art school, with critiques, tutorials, lectures and discussions. This week’s guest was philosopher of art Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin. Adrienne has been a friend of Morphe Arts for many years, not least in her role as chair of our trustees. I’m grateful for Adrienne’s research and ideas, particularly her work on the philosopher Susanne Langer. Adrienne’s thinking has shaped many of my own reflections on art and faith over the years, and much of what follows owes a debt to her lecture and the conversations that followed.

In recent years it feels easier to use the word “beautiful” when talking about contemporary art. Some of the intensity surrounding debates about beauty in the 1990s seems to have faded, or perhaps simply lost its urgency. When I was at art school around the turn of the century, calling a painting beautiful felt almost taboo. In critiques we were encouraged to use other words instead. A painting might be described as “strong” or “successful”, but rarely beautiful. One of our current artists remarked that their art school encouraged students to use the word “efficient”, which strikes me as a curious term to apply to a painting. It may be an excellent quality in a dishwasher or a tax return, but I remain unconvinced that efficiency is the highest goal of art.

Adrienne began by revisiting several exhibitions and writers who sought to reclaim beauty from its exile. Among them was the exhibition Regarding Beauty at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, which explored whether beauty might still have a place in contemporary art after decades of suspicion.

The problem was that beauty had become entangled with all manner of ideologies and power structures: authority, religion, class, gender, politics, colonialism and much else besides. The word arrived carrying a great deal of historical luggage. At art school, all we wanted to do was tell a friend that their painting looked beautiful, yet the term itself seemed burdened with centuries of philosophical and political debate. Before long, an innocent remark about someone’s landscape painting could leave you wrestling with Kant, colonialism and the politics of representation. It often felt safer simply to compliment the brushwork than to risk invoking several hundred years of aesthetic theory before lunch. Art school is one of the few places where a passing comment about a sunset can unexpectedly require a reading list.

In my book Why Art Matters, I dedicated a chapter to beauty and attempted to sketch out something like a Christian theology of beauty. Looking back, attempting to summarise several thousand years of aesthetic philosophy and Christian thought in a single chapter was perhaps a little optimistic. Publishers generally prefer their authors to show more restraint. To speak of the Christian theology of beauty may already be misleading. There are many traditions, many voices and many disagreements.

Interestingly, the word beautiful appears far less frequently in Scripture than we might imagine. The situation is rather similar to the word art, which doesn’t appear at all. This should perhaps make us cautious whenever we claim absolute certainty about what constitutes Christian beauty or Christian art. The biblical material is rich, but it does not lend itself easily to simplistic conclusions.

Many theological accounts begin with the character of God. We love because God first loved us. We create because God first created. We show mercy because God is merciful. Yet I struggle to think of a passage where God is directly described as beautiful. Perhaps you can help me here if I have forgotten an obvious example.

Scripture certainly speaks of beauty, though often in surprising ways. Creation is beautiful. Men and women such as Esther and Rebekah are described as beautiful. Isaiah speaks of the “beautiful” feet of those who bring good news, a passage later echoed by Paul in Romans. The Bible speaks often of glory, splendour, radiance and majesty, yet beauty itself remains strangely elusive. Rather than offering a neat definition, Scripture seems content to point towards beauty through people, places, acts of goodness and moments of revelation.

In Genesis, God repeatedly looks upon creation and declares that it is “good”. The Hebrew word tov carries a richness of meaning that can also encompass beauty, delight and flourishing. In this sense goodness and beauty seem deeply connected. As Hans Urs von Balthasar suggested, beauty may be the way goodness becomes visible to us.

Elsewhere, beauty is understood in different ways. Classical traditions sought beauty in harmony, proportion and order. Celtic Christians often found beauty in wild places, seeing the glory of God not merely in cultivated gardens but also in rugged coastlines, rough seas and untamed landscapes. Beauty could be found in order, but also in mystery.

What are we to make of such a varied collection of ideas?

Personally, I’m with those who think that beauty cannot be reduced to a single definition. It exists within a matrix of meanings and experiences. We may disagree profoundly about what beauty is, yet somehow continue to recognise it when it appears.

Beauty seems to possess both a surface and a depth. Something beautiful first attracts our attention, but then points beyond itself. It gestures towards meaning, goodness, redemption, truth, transcendence or perhaps simply wonder.

This may be why beauty proves so difficult to define. Most definitions attempt to pin beauty down, yet beauty rarely sits still for very long. The moment we think we have captured it, it has already directed our gaze elsewhere. Beauty functions less like a destination and more like a signpost. It draws us towards realities that exceed the object itself.

A painting may be beautiful, but the experience of beauty is rarely confined to paint on canvas. A landscape may be beautiful, but what moves us is often something deeper than a pleasing arrangement of hills and trees. Even an act of generosity can strike us as beautiful, the hosting of a meal, an invite to tea and cake. In each case beauty seems to reveal something about the world that we had not quite noticed before.

Perhaps this is one reason we artists continue to concern ourselves with beauty, even when we struggle to define it. As artists and makers, we are not simply commentators on beauty but are actively trying to pursue it.

This does not mean that artists possess a secret knowledge unavailable to the rest of humankind. Most artists are often just as confused as everyone else. We merely have the advantage of turning our confusion into exhibitions.

Yet art allows us to venture towards beauty rather than merely talk about it. Where philosophers seek definitions, artists often seek encounters. Indeed, as Nicolas Bourriaud, founder of relational aesthetics, famously observed, “All art is encounter.” While Bourriaud’s argument lies elsewhere, I believe his observation opens possibilities for considering the beauty of relationship in the process of art making. Art creates encounters: encounters with materials, with ideas, with other people, with the world around us and, at its best, with realities that exceed our ordinary ways of seeing.

The trouble with beauty, then, may not be that it resists definition. The trouble is that it refuses to remain an idea. Beauty asks something of us. It invites attention. It calls us beyond ourselves. It awakens longing for things that are true, good and whole.

Perhaps that is why beauty has survived every attempt to dismiss it. We continue to seek it because we continue to need it. In a fractured world, beauty reminds us that there is still meaning to be found, still wonder to be experienced and still glory to be glimpsed.

Which may explain why a group of artists in East London spent part of a Monday morning discussing beauty rather than getting on with their work. Then again, discussing beauty may well be part of the work. Either way, it made for a surprisingly enjoyable start to the week.

Alastair Gordon is a London-based author, artist, frequent Hutchmoot speaker and the co-founder of Morphē Arts, a charity supporting Christians in the arts. Read more from Alastair on his Substack, Creative Creatures.