Customer Reviews

Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art

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Steiner recasts the thread of 20th century art as the search for the sublime gone wrong. The Kantian definition of the sublime as that which inspires awe and disinterested interest has lead to a dehumanization of art. According to her,this has come about because in the search for the eternal values that are associated with the sublime, the merely lovely has come to be associated with transience. Beauty has also been implicated, certainly as it applies to female subjects in art, since human beauty fades and turns to its opposite, it cannot be a fit subject for the search for the sublime. The process has led to a sterility driven by the replacement of life perpetuating emotions with formal issues. The course of art in the past century has thus followed a path through ever greater alienation. Artists have felt compelled to tackle ever more emotion laden and controversial subjects, confronting and challenging the public to see beyond the shock value to the formal issues that the artist purports to be elevating to the level of sublime.

As an artist who has been wrestling with these issues for over a quarter century, I really enjoyed Steiner's lucid exposition of the Zeitgeist which forms the backdrop for most thinking artist's work. Artist and public both, I believe dance rather unconsciously around the issues she is writing about. We know on an instinctual level what is going on, but it is really enlightening to read someone's thoughtful analysis. I found her writing enjoyable to read and quite accessible.

Her focus is primarily on the depiction of women in art as subjects for the contemplation of beauty. She shows how the images of women in the last 100 years or so have reflected the rejection of life perpetuating human emotions as unfit for high art. She sees signs of change. We are no longer requiring a sacrifice of what makes us human in the name of art. She sees a time "when beauty, pleasure, and freedom again become the domain of aesthetic experience and art offers a worthy ideal for life."

I highly recommend this book to artist and art appreciator alike, anyone who has wondered why avant garde art always seems so ugly.

I bought this book and was thoroughly pleased. Steiner is a great writer and has consistently written good work. I do agree that her agenda is a little heavy, but if you care to read her other work you will see that she is qualified in making the pronouncements she does. It is the privilege of anyone who has worked this long in the field. I would recommend reading her "Pictures of Romance" for a deeper treatment of aesthetics. It is a great book as well. This book however, is correct in the thesis it sets out to trace. Steiner locates the demise of the concept of beauty in Kantian aesthetics, specifically the "Critique of Judgment". I especially appreciate the way she makes Kant's arguments come alive by comparing them to Shelley's Frankenstein. In the end Kant trades places with Frankenstein...the doctor and the monster. Steiner works out her feminism by removing the locus of intellectual value from Kant, and placing it with Mary Shelley. That's good feminism, subtle and unmistakeable. Some people may not like Steiner because her feminism is not of the usual kind. I mean, she is not a "beauty myth" kind of feminist. Don't think she's not a feminist though, her message is loud and clear. I recommend this book strongly.

In a sense, Wendy Steiner finds little to distinguish appearance from reality. In Venus in Exile, The rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, for example, Steiner equates the 'beauty' of a woman as person with the 'beauty' of that woman's depiction. Ironically, Steiner borrows this universalizing view from the same philosopher that she identifies as anathema to beauty. Following Kant, Steiner links natural to artistic beauty, and, hence, holds an aesthetic view that overrides ontological categories. Thus, in the world according to Stiener Beauty equals Woman equals Art. The snake in the garden, however, is Kant's idea of the sublime. The sublime appeals, she claims, to the self-erasing thrill of a brush with death. In contrast, the allure of beauty promotes interest in life. In fact, Steiner recommends that viewers and artwork interact after the model of Cupid and Psyche. (Imagine, for example, a chummy interaction of diner and bed with Notre Dame or a piano concerto.) Moreover, the desire to experience the thrill of the sublime explains the denial of Beauty/Woman that characterizes the art of the 20th century. In addition to the distortions (i.e. pornographic imagery) or avoidance (i.e. non-representational shapes) of female figuration, 20t-century art also excludes or diminishes domestic subjects. Together the exclusions of beauty and woman and the 'good' or the non-aesthetic value of domesticity show, Steiner argues, the misogyny of the artists and, thereby, their hatred of life, love, and so on.

Given Steiner's credentials, the intellectual sloppiness that informs Venus in Exile is disappointing. In addition to her uncritical acceptance of art defined as aesthetic effect, her opinions betray Freud -images in art as in dream point to external causes-as the father of her psycho - utopian love child called Venus in Exile. Moreover, why the sudden, slap dash treatment of modern dance and the tiresome swipe at ballet in the last three pages of the book? That addition did little more than demean the art forms. Art forms, moreover, dominated by women. Finally, the hyperbole that demonized Kant and reduced the artwork of an entire century to the status of thrill distracted from rather than expanded on the topics of art, aesthetics, and woman as subject.