Beauty Afoot

I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of "What's Happening Now," drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized that I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what "The Issue of the Nineties" would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, "Beauty," and then, more firmly, "The issue of the nineties will be beauty" -- a total improvisatory goof-- an off-the-wall, jump-start, free-association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic, wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don't know, but the total, uncomprehending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate credence for me.

My interlocutor plopped back into his seat, exuding dismay, and, out of sheer perversity, I resolved to follow beauty where it led into the silence. Improvising, I began updating Pater; I insisted that beauty was not a thing-- "the beautiful" was a thing. In images, I intoned, beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the quested of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence. This sounded provocative to me, but the audience continued to sit there, unprovoked, and "beauty" just hovered there, as well, a word without a language, quiet, amazing and alien in that sleek, institutional space-- like a Pre-Raphaelite dragon aloft on its leather wings.

"If images don't do anything in this culture," I said, plunging on, "if they haven't done anything, then why are we sitting here in the twilight of the twentieth century talking about them? And if they only do things after we have talked about them, then they aren't doing them, we are. Therefore, if our criticism aspires to anything beyond soft-science, the efficacy of images must be the cause of criticism, and not its consequence-- the subject of criticism and not its object. And this, " I concluded rather grandly, "is why I direct your attention to the language of visual affect-- to the rhetoric of how things look-- to the iconography of desire-- in a word, to beauty!"

I made a viola gesture for punctuation, but to no avail. People were quietly filing out. My fellow panelists gazed into the dark reaches of the balcony or examined their cuticles. I was genuinely surprised. Admittedly, it was a goof. Beauty? Pleasure? Efficacy? Issues of the Nineties? Admittedly outrageous. Bus it was an outrage worthy of a rejoinder-- of a question or two-- a nod-- or at least a giggle. I had wandered into this dead zone, this silent abyss. I wasn't ready to leave it at that, but the moderator of our panel tapped on her microphone and said, "Well, I guess that's it, kids." So I never got off my parting shot. As we began breaking up, shuffling papers and patting our pockets, I felt a little sulky. (Swallowing a pity allusion to Roland Barthes can do that.) And yet, I had no sooner walked out of the building and into the autumn evening when I was overcome by this strange Sherlock Holmesian elation. The game was afoot.


The Invisible Dragon, "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty"

by Dave Hickey

selected by Mia