Our Responses to Beauty
Discussion
How do you feel about plastic bags? What is your emotional response to them?
Listening comprehension
- Watch an extract from American Beauty (2000) with the sound down. The extract is probably drawn from the original silent film entitled Variations by Dorsky.
- How do you feel about the plastic bag in the film?
Watch the extract again with the commentary from: Ricky: Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?, then answer the questions that follow.
Questions When did Ricky film the bag?
What does he compare the bag to?
For how long was the bag caught in the wind?
What did the bag make Ricky realize?
Why does Ricky make videos like the one of the plastic bag?
Why does Ricky say “Video’s a poor excuse…”?
Fill in the gaps below:
Ricky: Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed? -
It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from ____________ and there’s this __________ in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, ____________ with me. Like a little ______ begging me to play with it. For ________ minutes. And that’s the day I knew there was this entire ______ behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent _________, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be _______, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me ___________... and I need to ___________... Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the ________ I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.From American Beauty (2000)– Screen play by Alan Ball, directed by Sam Mendes.
If you now find the bag beautiful or even see it in a different light then you have been shown up as having made a mistake about beauty. According to Elaine Scarry, professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, making errors about beauty reveals much about how beauty is allied with truth.
Now think of examples of your own and to write down how you felt afterwards. Share your experiences with the class.
If beauty is allied to truth as Scarry argues then it makes sense to surround ourselves with it and train ourselves to see it.
Listening Homework
Listen to the radio program with Harvard professor of aesthetics Elaine Scarry and architect Moshe Safdie. While you listen answer the questions below. Be prepared to discuss your answers in class.
http://theconnection.wbur.org/2002/03/27/the-return-of-beauty
1) According to Elaine Scarry, what did the Greeks think being in the presence of beauty could do for people? (From around minute 2)
2a) According to Moshe Safdie what is the definition of beauty in architecture? (from around minute 4)
2b) What is ‘fitness’ according to Moshe Safdie ? (from around minute 10)
3) According to Elaine Scarry in the 80s and 90s, the act of staring at beautiful objects was wrongly judged as destructive. Explain this. (from around minute 6 :20-9 :50).
4) Why did Plato love beauty? (around minute 12 :30)
Links
'On Beauty and Being Just' by Elaine Scarry -Tanner Lecture Yale University -
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Nature, Art & Language
© All Copyright, 2007, Ray Genet
posted by Ray Genet at
11:05 AM
2 Comments:
Hi,
I want to explain you my opinion on a property from Beauty that I call, partial completion. When you read the first twenty pages of the book of Elaine Scarry On Beauty and being just, you can understand that when people see a beautiful thing, he is motivated by an unknown energy to duplicate the object, or keep it in a different form of Art, or by modifying a thing on the original object: So in each copy, or modified object, you keep a part of the original object that has inspired you. But What I wanted to add is that sometimes you keep all the details of the original and you add something that makes your new object more beautiful than the previous. I give two examples:
- the first is about the scene described in Elaine Scarry’s Book On Beauty and Being Just about the meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa: As you can see in the painting from Michele Desubleo ‘Ulisse e Nausica’, the whole painting described and summarised nearly all the story: the great monologue from Odysseus, the fact that only Nausicaa managed to see and keep her eyes on Odysseus, a strange guy that is not usual in her land,…. So from an original text, the painter manages to give an art object that is for me more beautiful than the original text: with your eyes you could find all the details of the original text. That is transformation of an original beautiful object and the addition of something more in the finished object.
- The second example I s about Dance, and especially Ballet: You could take in a separate way the Music, and the movements of the dancers, they are both beautiful. But if you arrived to mix in a final piece these two components, the result is both your eyes and your ears that are working together to get something beautiful, and more beautiful than only one component of the piece. An other example is when you ear the Requiem (K626) from Mozart, you could not imagine that it is to celebrate the death of somebody, and you could imagine that the dead man will prefer to ear such a piece than stayed in the grave.
To Conclude, I could say that your senses give you the feeling that you are behind something beautiful, and in that way I could say that beauty is not universal, it depends on your personal background and experiences (with similarities in a specified culture), but the way you will react behind Beauty is the same for all Human Beings.
Hello,
It is well-known that artists have something in common, even though they do not practise the same art: they perfectly understand what beauty is.
Artists can inspire each other and therefore, they can turn a specific type of beauty into another one, as if you were turning electrical energy into mechanical energy for instance.
This analogy between beauty and energy would show that beauty would be something very concrete and would not be part of Plato’s world of Ideas.
Moreover, we also know that science can be compared to beauty because science shows the harmony of the world. Many scientists consider that science is something beautiful.
You don’t find scientific results all the time; you need to have good ideas, ie to be inspired. Would scientists be inspired by art in their work? It already happened during the Renaissance. The cooperation between scientists and artists was very productive and people, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, could be both artists and scientists.
To conclude we see that both artists and scientists need to be inspired and use beauty to be more efficient. They can produce beauty but can also detect it in different disciplines, not necessarily in their own.
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