Title: "Grevy's Zebra" (from the Endangered Species Portfolio) 1983
Artist: Andy Warhol
In 1983, Andy Warhol created a series of ten color screenprints that portrayed endangered animals from around the world. Using brilliant colors -- characteristic of his signature style -- and poignant expressions suggestive of the animal's fate, Warhol creates a dynamic tension between art and reality.
Taken from http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/warhol/
This article, "Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty", discusses the place of beauty in art, in the contexts of culture, politics, religion, the marketplace, etc.... I've included some specific quotes that I liked, also trying to summerize the main points of this article. The author describes beauty: "Beauty is not a thing. The Beautiful is a thing. In images, beauty is the agency that causes visual pleasure in the beholder, and, since pleasure is the true occasion for looking at anything, any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begs the question of art's efficacy and dooms itself to inconsequence!...The task of beauty is to enfranchise the audience and acknowledge its power--to designate a territory of shared values between the image and its beholder and then, in this territory, to advance an argument by valorizing the picture's problematic content. Without the urgent intention of reconstructing the beholder's view of things, the image has no reason to exist, much less to be beautiful." Baudelaire says, "'The beautiful is always strange'...It is always strangely familiar and vaguely surprising." Only with one's full appreciation and understanding of a piece of art can viewers "engage the argument of images that deal so intimately with trust, pain, love, and the giving up of the self" a true "visual experience".
The author also discusses the new, liberal institution, which "is not as cavalier about appearances as the market is about meaning...The institution's curators hold a public trust. They must look attentively and genuinely care about what artists mean, and what this meaning means in a public context--and, therefore, almost of necessity, they must distrust appearances." Art created in this way "steals the institution's power". The beauty of this art is evident in the pure honesty of the art itself. And the author states that "the truth is never plain nor appearances sincere. To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that images are always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial."
"The vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent instrument for change. Mapplethorpe uses it, as does Warhol, as does Ruscha, to engage individuals within and without the cultural ghetto in arguments about what is good and what is beautiful."
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