GILDED BIRDS

Gilded Birds examines contemporary ideals of beauty by asking the world’s greatest minds to choose one object they find beautiful and do a short interview about it. These interviews challenge and expand our ideas about what is beautiful, but they also give a unique and personal insight into the mind of the interviewee. In addition to this, they provide brief introductions to many fields in a simple format that is easy for the layperson to understand. Interviewees are set a few parameters as the project is primarily about visual beauty. They must choose an object that exists in the material world and they’re not allowed to choose people.  Here are a few of the questions that have been raised in the course of our interviews so far. They are an illustration of the debate rather than a set of definitive answers.  

Is beauty out of style? Bella freud, designer.

GB Do you look for beauty in art or do you see it as something irrelevant?

BF I might find something beautiful in art in a book but I’m not sure about the category of beauty. When I hear the word I think more about face cream.. which I’m quite interested in as well! I’ll often find myself saying things are beautiful but I won’t be looking for it. I suppose people in the 18th century were making glass and chandeliers and things of incredible beauty that have now become a part of our everyday lives and so it seems more modern and elegant to make something simpler.

Are the Modernists to blame for a bad attitude to beauty? Michael Rosen, philosopher

GB I believe the Modernists were deadly serious but don’t you think there have been a lot of meaningless imitations of them?

MR Yes! Once again, we see that the best argument for professional philosophy is amateurs! There are, unfortunately, people out there who practise post-modern conceptual art as a form of banal philosophy. I find that particularly dispiriting. But then there are works like Jasper Johns’ series of numbers. Those are incredible works that you perhaps interpret in an immediate way as a conventional token. Yet, when you look at them closely you see that you’ve imposed an immediate, simple meaning on an artifact that is much more complex. It’s art that is distinctively visual rather than conceptual. At the same time, it’s intellectually challenging and contains extraordinary virtuosity.

Can beauty guide us towards the answer to why the world exists? Jim Holt, philosopher

Oh I wish that were true! I think the universe is more ugly than it is beautiful. I use this slightly tongue in cheek proof that reality at a general level takes a logically unique form. Ironically this proof begins with principles of simplicity and fullness. Simplicity being a bedrock principle of science, that you always reach for the most simple explanation and the principle of fullness being a traditional philosophical principle that goes back to Plato. Beginning with these and going through a few twists of logic I end up with the conclusion that the form we can expect reality to take at its most general level is that of an infinite, incomplete mediocre mess. The laws of physics are not particularly elegant. The ingredients of the universe show no aesthetic parsimony. There are 60 odd elementary particles. That’s way more than is necessary. If the universe is created by a God it’s a God with no sense of economy or elegance. 

Are ideals of beauty linked to identity? Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosopher

GB Do you think that people who know Africa and Ghana get something out of the work that other people in Brooklyn weren’t getting?

KAA I think the connection with these cloths is much written about. I’m sure it’s in the catalogue so a moderately educated viewer would know about it. And kente is relatively well known in the United States because it’s become a sort of Afro-centric symbol. It’s always the case with a work of art that there are things that belong to it for any viewer and things that belong to it for each viewer. I’m sure there are resonances for people who are familiar with the fabric traditions, that wouldn’t be there for someone who isn’t, but as Eliot said, you can’t be universal without being particular. Anybody can grasp these issues about the way it is between metal and fabric, sculpture and painting. But a Nigerian might recognize the company that made the bottle tops.

Is beauty a political issue? G. Gabrielle Starr, Professor of English

One of the real challenges of a lot of African-American art and literature in the 20th century and even as far back as the 18th century, is the relationship between the more sensually and artistically isolatable elements of the work and the political and social work that the artists are doing. So for the first 250 years of African-American artistic production it’s very clear that the political was absolutely inseparable from any other claim that could be made. It’s not until you get reactions to the Black Art Movement in the 1960s and 70s, (with some earlier notable exceptions like Zora Neale Hurston), that there is not a primary political claim being made by the artwork. The same is true of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry in the 18th century. She’s saying, “Look, I can read and write.” It’s a claim to citizenship, to humanity, but there’s something special about making that claim in artistic form. You can do it by an act of physical rebellion but doing it by an act of art makes certain claims on the viewer and claims about the artist. They can be claims about one’s belonging to a canon, claims to taste. They can be clams about one’s ability to revise tradition or to be part of an institution. They can be claims that “I” the artist can make something of beauty and move you even against your will. So yes, I think it’s part of our aesthetic response but part of the challenge of looking at these artworks, is that many people want to engage them as being essentially political in a way that is not artistic and I think it’s entirely wrong to do so.

Is beauty connected to truth? Edward Frenkel, mathematician

Yes, they are connected. Beauty has always been a guiding principle in science and mathematics. Some even go as far as saying that beauty is more important. The great mathematician Hermann Weyl once said: “My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.” And another mathematician, GH Hardy wrote: “there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics.” I like the romantic sentiment expressed here, and I do believe that mathematical truths are beautiful — perhaps, in a higher sense that we may not be able to appreciate at first. But mathematics is ultimately a quest for truth. I would take a correct, but ugly proof over a beautiful, but false one any day. Later, we may find a better and more beautiful proof, or we might realize that the proof we had was not ugly at all if we look at it in the right light.

Should there be consensus about what we find beautiful? Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology

GB Do you think that consensus around what we find beautiful is important?

RS To me, it has a deeper philosophical meaning. My thoughts about this are not original. They come from my friend, Elaine Scarry, who argues that there’s a relationship between what’s just and what’s beautiful. When we think about justice in purely utilitarian terms, without considering whether it satisfies criteria of fitness, of elegance, of simplicity or whatever category for beauty we use, the justice becomes less compelling. When she first advanced this view, a lot of people wondered what on earth she was talking about and the only people to whom it made sense were Supreme Court Justices, because they know that a lot of cases involve something that has a missing human element. Stephen Briar was most up front about this in saying that what a lot of lawyers are really arguing about is the missing human element in a law that can be justified perfectly rationally one way or another.

Can beauty inspire religious belief? Tamsin Shaw, philosopher

I think gilt has become associated for us with gaudiness and materialism whereas there was a whole Gothic aesthetic in the medieval era that associated preciousness with holiness. There was a long history of making these elaborate, gilded, jewelled reliquaries for the relics that were their most holy objects. Then the Gothic architects built versions of those on an incredibly grand scale like Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. That whole aesthetic is lost to us now but it was the context in which these sculptures were created and part of what’s beautiful about them now is the pathos of all that being lost and them ending up in the middle of Manhattan.

Is there such a thing as universal beauty? Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics

Most would today refrain from talking about objective beauty and emphasize instead that beauty is largely subjective. But the very fact that the standards set by Greece and Rome are still compelling tells me in fact that there are objective characteristics that render a work beautiful. This can be ascertained with both positive and negative evidence. For a face to be experienced as beautiful, its constituents must have certain relationships to one another; any departure from these relationships immediately disqualifies a work from being experienced as beautiful. This is something that Francis Bacon, in particular, understood well. He wanted, he said, to give viewers a “visual shock” and succeeded in doing so by subverting the brain’s template for what a normal face or body looks like. The consequence is that few describe Bacon’s work as beautiful even though many agree that it has artistic merit of the highest order.

Can an object be banal and beautiful? Ned Block, philosopher

Their visual appeal to me is a matter of their affordances.  “Affordance” is a term introduced by the psychologist James J. Gibson for the latent possibilities of action in the environment. To experience affordances of an object it needs to be close enough to you to grasp—in what is called peripersonal space.  The photo won’t work very well since the part of your visual system that is concerned with affordances does not categorize the picture as a real three-dimensional object. That is one reason that photographs of sculptures are so disappointing.  The affordance dimension is missing in many kinds of art.I think the topic of affordances is scanted in most art criticism.  Amazingly, we have two pretty much separate visual systems.  One of them (the “ventral” system that starts in the visual areas in the back of the head and feeds into the sides of the head) is conscious and the one that most art exploits – but there is another one (the “dorsal” system that feeds to the top of the head) that is mainly unconscious and governs action.  The dorsal system probably dominates affordances, certainly any affordances that have to do with shape or motion. My guess is that many of our more subtle aesthetic reactions are dominated by that affordance system.

What do fine art curators find beautiful? Tim Marlow, art historian

I was worried about picking this in case it was too sentimental or too kooky, which sometimes parents can be. But I spend much of my life looking at beautiful objects and I thought there’s no point in choosing a work of art because self-evidently, they are essentially regarded as the epitome of what is considered to be beautiful, so I thought I’d choose something intensely personal. I set myself a parameter of finding something in my every day life. Most mornings when I go in to wake my son up or when he’s already got up I notice this space that’s been left. I remember once smelling it and it’s the most beautiful thing. I also realised that it’s clearly linked in my mind to my father who I held when he died. My mother and brother were there too and being there during the moment of death was the most extraordinarily moving thing.

What do contemporary artists find beautiful? Marina Abramovič, artist

MB We always forget about drinking water. We do so many activities at the same time without thinking. I think to take a glass of water and make it into a ritual is really important. There are so many objects that are always around that we don’t think about at all. I think water is one of the most beautiful things in my life. It’s clean, it’s nourishing and we can’t live without it.

GB And when you perform, a glass of water is one of the only things you have with you.

MA Exactly. Even for the long durational works where I go without eating I still have to have a glass of water. When you think about precious objects, a glass of water is the most precious. I hope that more people will choose a glass of water for this project!

Who finds contemporary art beautiful? Hari Kunzru, author

I find it endlessly fascinating to look at those bodies and the shapes of those bodies. The ambiguity of the way they’re dressed and the way they’re moving makes it unusually compelling. We’re looking at these two guys in business wear and we know that they’re not business guys, they’re hip downtown New Yorkers. From what I understand, Robert Longo was throwing balls at them to get them to move around, but they look like it could be a Robert Capa of people being shot on the battlefield, but also they could be people in a band because there’s something ecstatic about it, there’s something that suggests their souls are coming out of their bodies in some way. That possibility of violence and sexual ecstasy and hedonist dancing is all there at once. I especially like it in the way they’re dressed because it seems to question everybody’s conservative uniform.

How broad are ideals of beauty? Dickie Beau, drag fabulist

One of the things I wanted from the performers was that they become vessels of the spoken-word material and a way of getting them inside their bodies so they could really be faithful to the sound and imagine how that sound might travel through their bodies, was to bring them to the level of the eye noise as I call it, or floaters that we see in our eyeballs. To see eye noise you have to be looking into light so we could do this in rehearsals but it was tricky in performances with theatre light. It was a good technique for getting the actors into a sort of altered state and it came to me as an object of beauty because it speaks to so many things I’m interested in.

One can’t choose people for Gilded Birds. How about body parts? Dilara Findikoglu, designer

I made a dress where I used casts of my own vagina that represented Eve. It represents creativity, not just giving in birth, but our ability to create anything we want. The dress portrays the Garden of Eden with forbidden fruits and snakes and real preserved flowers. I wanted to put something there that could represent the creative process – so I started off casting my good friend Harriet’s vagina, but it was difficult because the alginate dries very quickly. We did one but then I needed to do a lot more and I felt I couldn’t keep asking her – so mine was the closest one! I didn’t want to use mine at first because I felt a bit uncomfortable but now I don’t care. It is so forbidden and secretive, that’s what makes the vagina the most beautiful thing in the world for me. It’s the greatest source of satisfaction but also of beauty and birth. Humanity would die without it.

Is nature the highest form of beauty? Thom Yorke, musician

I reckon some of our ideas of beauty from the man-made world could be too self-referential and do us no favours. Too much time spent in cities you know? Surrounded by our own image, and our own intentions, our edifices to our brilliance. Having said that, the other thing I was going to suggest for a thing of beauty was a sports car.When you are lost in a landscape mentally and physically your ‘human’ awareness can be wiped clean and you are simply part of your surroundings. A kind of meditation I would say, but your mind is not empty or clear, it is full of what is around you. The landscape is beautiful in the sense that it simply does not require you, it exists in its own right and it is not there wishing to be admired. I guess on the other hand the best art, human made, comes about the same way. It happens, it was like it was always meant to happen.

Is there beauty beyond our planet? Ross Andersen, editor

That symbolic relationship, between time and the moon, might be a relic of ancient intellectual history. One of the most profound shifts in human thinking, on par with the revolutions launched by Copernicus and Darwin, occurred when we began to situate ourselves in time. And we know the moon played a big role in that shift, because the first calendars were based on the lunar cycle. That has to be one of the more consequential encounters between the moon and human consciousness, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the crescent commemorates it in some way. But that’s just speculation.GB: Are the moon, the earth and the cosmos more beautiful to you, the more you know about them?RA: I think so. The more you know about how nature works, the more you see the intricacy of its machinery on every level, from the subatomic to the cosmic. And when you realize that the whole complex edifice emerges from relatively simple laws, that definitely lends a glow to nature that could reasonably be called beauty.

What do we know about prehistoric beauty? John Onions, art historian

GB Do you think beauty was part of the intention of whoever drew this?

JO No. Absolutely not. I have argued that the person who made this didn’t know about art and was driven by completely unconscious neural processes, so that they were amazed by what they had made. There’s another similar bear just behind it. It looks as though the artist was so excited by what they’d made that they went on to make copies of it. Each time they make a copy they degrade the neural resources that were so fantastically rich when they had only looked at a real bear. But once you look at your own image and try to make another then the next images become gradually more reduced so the history of art goes downhill from its start. To me there is no more beautiful portrayal of a bear in subsequent history. Leonardo drew bears and they look absolutely crummy. Leonardo never had that intense admiration for the bear that this artist did.