Bored by the Beautiful

What delights the senses may bore the mind.

I’ve gradually become puzzled by my own reaction to aesthetic experience. Music has never interested me greatly, though I’m not tone deaf. I can recognise tunes, and I have likes and dislikes, but I hardly ever feel a wish to listen to music. Indeed music on its own, not accompanying either action or song, seems odd. Plato considered the principal function of music to be accompanying the marching of soldiers, and he may have spotted something there, though we need to take his comments, on this as on every other subject, with more than a grain of salt.

So far as visual art is concerned, I recently I started looking round the London art galleries. Here my reaction was strange. There were some pictures I found beautiful, and others I found ugly, yet I tended to pass by the beautiful quickly, and the pictures over which I lingered were often the ugly, though I did not linger over all the ugly pictures.

If I were somehow compelled to concentrate on the aesthetic experience, there are pieces of music and pictures I should prefer to others, and I think my preferences would be fairly conventional. However, I do not enjoy concentrating on experience, I like following trains of ideas and solving puzzles, so I prefer to avoid music, because it interrupts my train of thought, and the enjoyment I sometimes derive from looking at a picture is derived mainly from its capacity to stimulate thought.

Pictures of the market stalls, kitchens, machines and vehicles of centuries ago fascinate me because of what they show, but pictures of people enacting scenes from classical mythology interest me only as evidence that people used to think that amusing.

Quite the opposite view was expounded by Clive Bell, who held that no knowledge of the external world should be necessary for the appreciation of visual art, except that to appreciate some paintings one needs to realise how the two dimensional canvass is used to represent three dimensional physical space. He seems to have found artistic merit only in some abstract form that could be appreciated without having any idea of the subject. There is no need o be able to distinguish between a crowd of people watching an execution, a crowd of children watching a Punch and Judy show, and rows of knitting machines in a hosiery factory, because for Bell no genuinely aesthetic judgement should be affected by the distinction.

I seem gradually to be moving to a position where I find value only in the aspects of art that Bell regarded as irrelevant.