Beauty is the point at which the two meanings of the
word “sense” come together, the body-sense
of cognition and the mind-skill of understanding the meaning of signs. When we leave the sensual aspect to
beauty and start to think about it in the abstract terms of logic, we arrive at
the science of aesthetics as the modern science of cognition. This science tries
to find out what we mean, when we say “beautiful” or “ugly” and why. The main question is: Are there any universal and
timeless criteria for beauty? If we watch an old Greek sculpture or an Indian mandala,
a Japanese garden or a Russian icon, we
begin to suspect that there could be. But as we all know, every time has its
own taste. And after a while every aesthetic fashion returns - as a retro-revival! (No matter, whether this
means columns at the house entry or gothic tales.) But this magic power of our universal
beauty instinct leads us directly to the urgly question of kitsch... (a German word with universal meaning).
The human ability to spontaneously recognise natural
beauty demonstrates to us the problem of KITSCH
(a non-translatable German term that means simple aesthetic stereotypes,
trashy art-clichés that do not exist in reality). When we, me and my younger sister,
were children (at the age of 8 or 10 years), my father, a teacher for arts and
history, had a simple but wise system to teach his students to distinguish “real
beauty” and “Kitsch”. He gave us a wild mixture of art-postcards with reproductions
of famous paintings and kitschy pictures that we had to arrange into two piles:
art and kitsch. We always managed our work very well without saying a word: The
pile with the postcards that we children liked was Kitsch, what we did not like
was “real art”. Our beauty instinct was infallible. We never made any mistake!
Kitsch is simple, easy to understand, it shows a simple, symmetrical order,
something we love in an ideal state – how beautiful! It is completely
international because it is the answer to the lowest level of our
beauty-instinct. In his famous essay On
Naive and Sentimental Poetry the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)
gave a warning not to take the pleasant already for the beautiful and not to
mix up a “cute mind” with the beauty of the soul. He explained that “cute minds”
become banal when they have to work on or write about a complex and huge
object, the easy-going paragons of virtue turn to the materialistic, but only
the truly beautiful soul becomes “sublime”.[1]
We have to
consider: There are two kinds of beauty – the natural beauty of our senses and
the aesthetic beauty as a construction of our mind. (The German philosopher
Immanuel Kant, father of Critical Philosophy, distinguished between beauty and the
sublime: A landscape, a flower or a body can be beautiful; a poem, a painting
or a cathedral are sublime.) In modern and post-modern art (including
literature), the low-level art of Kitsch fortunately is no longer discriminated
against as worthless. It is, on the contrary, integrated (as trash or pop) in
the collage of our aesthetic concept! Nevertheless, it is useful for every
professional artist to know the difference between “real art” and Kitsch. (If
you are in doubt in which category your own work belongs, ask some children
whether they like it…) Here we have, surprisingly, found a path to the bridge
between the aesthetic category of beauty and our fascination for horror…
[1] „Wie
in dem handelnden Leben, so begegnet es auch oft bei dichterischen Darstellungen,
den bloß leichten Sinn, das angenehme Talent, die fröhliche Gutmüthigkeit mit
Schönheit der Seele zu verwechseln, und da sich der gemeine Geschmack überhaupt
nie über das Angenehme erhebt, so ist es solchen niedlichen Geistern ein Leichtes, jenen Ruhm zu usurpieren, der
so schwer zu verdienen ist. Aber es gibt eine untrügliche Probe, vermittelst
deren man die Leichtigkeit des Naturells von der Leichtigkeit des Ideals, so
wie die Tugend des Temperaments von der wahrhaften Sittlichkeit des Charakters
unterscheiden kann, und diese ist, wenn beide sich an einem schwierigen und
großen Objekte versuchen. In einem solchen Fall geht das niedliche Genie
unfehlbar in das Platte, so wie die Temperamentstugend in das Materielle; die
wahrhaft schöne Seele hingegen geht eben so gewiß in die erhabene über.“ - Friedrich von Schiller: Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung
(quotation: www.gutenberg.spiegel.de/schiller/naivsent/ naivsent.htm).
