Ameliorating a Culturally Based Conception of Beauty

In the initial inquiry into beauty as a property of objects, I proposed that beauty is a property of objects that is delivered only through a subject whom is bound in their own culturally-dependent schematization of what beauty is (where it can be considered to be found, etc).What I wish to develop further is the concept of a cultural schema-based system of identification of objects as beautiful in light of the Kantian understanding which seeks to describe the same phenomenon but more adeptly by also including natural objects (such as flowers, bird song, the Grand Canyon, etc.) which seem to defy a culture-based schema model given the universality of their qualification as beautiful.

Establishing again that beauty is said to be expressed in an object when the interaction of a subject with an object elicits from the subject the statement, “this is beautiful.” Despite the appearance of being an objective claim of some kind, this is firmly planted in the realm of the subjective and is better phrased as “this presents to me the qualitative aspect which I know to be beauty.” Though few, if anyone, utters such a sentence when they encounter a beautiful object this description serves as a representation of what could be said to occur cognitively when a subject encounters such an object.

            What is important here is that beauty, ergo, does not exist as a real property of the object but as a subjective claim about the object. However, claims about objects being beautiful are more than mere idiosyncratic propensities. There is an astounding amount of agreement among people that certain art objects are beautiful, and further, as Kant points out, there seems to be even more agreement regarding natural objects as beautiful. Something which my previous account of a culturally based schema does a poor job of explaining (there is no condition which explains how these objects maintain their appeal across disparate cultures), but Kant provides an answer for in his division of the kinds of pleasure we feel when we encounter such objects – agreeable, beautiful, and good.

            Ameliorating the culture-based model then with Kant’s own divisions does not require its abolishment, but, instead, with the division of pleasures laid bare, it is clear to see how the mechanism of such a schema acts upon the moment one encounters a beautiful object. Typically, the object would, if it were beautiful, elicit the pleasure of beauty in the subject – though it may elicit other pleasures as well. However, cultural conditioning can obscure this pleasure, causing objects that would otherwise be beautiful to be seen merely as agreeable or good, with no reverence or recognition for their beauty – even perhaps without eliciting the pleasure of beauty at all. An example of this would be the call to prayer in most Islamic traditions, and it, actually provides a special kind of example. To many western ears, this call to prayer can be quite beautiful with flowing, lyrical lines in foreign, enticing modes. However, there is a propensity in certain Islamic cultures to view this act as merely good because it agrees with their concept of praising Allah and aids them in their devotion to their faith, but they do not recognize the call to prayer outside of its functional purpose – it is placed into the category of being good when it additionally belongs to the category as beautiful as well. This particular example has it that those outside of the culture find something within the culture beautiful that those who constitute that culture do not, and the inversion of this, which is far more typical, is easy to see. In this ameliorated state, what we find is that culture provides propensities in its constituting subjects which cause them to place objects into one of the three categories of pleasure while at times ignoring its equal presence in another category (this is not to posit the metaphysical property of beauty as existing somewhere between subject and object, but, rather, culture conditions the subject to have certain biases which no occlude an object from a particular category except in their own perception of that object).

            However, even in this amended state, there still remains a noticeable concern which is in regard to what of those objects that do not seem to elicit either of the three pleasures. The initial response should be that these objects fail to elicit pleasure of any kind and there need be any more confusion than that. But specifically, I am thinking of those artistic enterprises which fail in their time to be appreciated – being neither good, agreeable, nor beautiful by the understanding of the time – but are then introduced into one of these categories retroactively. The distinction must be made whether the objects always had those properties or whether culture applied those diagnostic properties to the objects after the fact.

            The only real conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the objects always maintained the potential to elicit pleasure in one of these three kinds but that they were excluded from all three by a cultural bias which was later altered, allowing the objects to be reassessed without this occlusion and found to express these properties (a fantastic tale of art artifacts unearthed which were unappreciated in their time only to be adored later). The concerns this raises, however, is whether someone or thing so alien to our own culture were to discover us or remnants of us that they might find the most inane things beautiful and may even find what we consider beautiful to be dull. This does not mean the objects they found did not participate in eliciting other kinds of pleasure but merely that they continually undergo a sort of reassessment which may place them in either category at any time given a set of background beliefs, and though the object does not change – and arguably then its ability to elicit any of the three pleasures – the arbiter of these distinctions remains the subject with their cultural baggage.

Blog 2 - Final "Is There an Objective Beauty?"

After reading the philosophers for this section on beauty, I am ready to concede that the beauty that we talk about on a daily basis is subjective and even that subjective opinion is generally socially constructed. However, I still wonder if there is a form of beauty that does not pertain to the subject. This objective form of beauty is a hard concept to even begin to understand. It is so difficult because so much of our understanding of beauty is subjective and socially constructed. It may be easier to grasp this form of the beautiful by comprehending what our subjective and socially constructed views are. From there, we can proceed to establish definitions of taste. With an unbiased gaze and a more nuanced understanding of taste, we might be able to begin to create a definition of objective beauty.

            Mary Devereaux argues that forms of representation take on a male gaze. This means in part that a neutral vision of beauty is impossible. She also argues that the expectations of the viewer are disproportionally effected by male needs, beliefs, and desires. In this sense, not only do male viewers have a specifically male perspective of the beautiful, but also all those (which includes a fair amount of females) that have accepted the masculine gaze and the male socially constructed understanding of beautiful. Certainly the subjective form of beauty has changed from generation to generation at least slightly, but that does not mean that male gaze is any less present. I agree with Devereaux that this observation permeates the majority of people’s beliefs about beauty. This also means that our ability to talk about and describe beauty is coded in the masculine gaze and language. In order to discuss beauty we use words that are used and have been used for a long time to describe the masculine understanding of beauty. What is beautiful and the words to label something beautiful are tainted by the male gaze.

            Perhaps this is rather white masculine of me, or simply naïve of me, but if we were able to strip ourselves of the masculine gaze and any other such gaze we could see the beautiful, not as a subjective concept, but something objective. This may in fact not be possible, because it may be well impossible to strip oneself of one’s subjectivity and therefore not be able to have an unbiased gaze. On the other hand, stripping the male gaze may be impractical due to the lack of some actual and relevant concept of beauty that this gaze produces. This concept of beauty might be so disingenuous that it no longer really means anything or has no value. This would entail some definition of beauty similar to ‘beauty is some property of object-ness.’ The fact that something has the property of being an object necessitates that it has the property of beauty as well. While this definition may seem useless and futile, perhaps this is the starting point to build up an objective understanding of beauty.

            I am not sure that I can at this point take this concept of objective beauty any further myself. However, I think that Immanuel Kant’s judgments of taste can add more to the restriction and clarification of objective beauty. Of course, Kant would never agree to the use of his judgments of taste in a discussion of objective beauty because he argues that all claims about beauty are subjective. Despite this, his explanation of the three judgments of taste - the agreeable, beautiful, and good – might add some level of clarification to an objective beauty. The agreeable is that which is sensational/feeling and therefore irrational. This would include the taste of some food, i.e. ‘sugar tastes good.’ The good is a taste that is based on the concept of that object and consequently rational. Food as a concept is necessary for you and therefore good to eat. Both of these judgments of taste are useful and interested pleasures. For Kant, the beautiful falls into a concept of disinterested pleasure. The beautiful does not have anything at stake, whereas judgments of the good and the agreeable do. I think that it is in this disinterested state of pleasure that the objective understanding of beauty may reside. In combination with the stripped gaze in the section above, beauty is therefore a property of an object that exhibits a disinterested pleasure and that one can only see through an unbiased gaze.

Unit 2 - Paper 2 - Beauty

I started my last response to the question of whether beauty is a real property of objects or is  simply in the eye of the beholder by affirming that beauty was both a real property found in objects and a matter of subjectivity that changes from eye to eye. I now completely disagree with what I first said. I now argue that beauty is neither a real property of objects nor is it purely subjective (where subjective means opinion based on the viewer).  I think part of my first paper that proves problematic for me now was my confusion of the word objective. Where I should have taken the word to mean a property of objects, I found myself thinking of it in terms of universality. When I look at objective as being a property found in an object, the overall unit question gains more clarity. My final thought, as of now at least (Kant was allowed to change his mind so i’m keeping that open) is that beauty can’t be objective because no one property is beautiful and can fulfill what the word beauty means but it can’t be subjective because that in some way dilutes the meaning and illegitimizes it.

For me, It was easy to see why at first, at least after reading and discussing Wollheim’s “Art and It’s Objects,” how I could feel that beauty is both a distinct property in something and also left up to the judgement of the viewer. For instance, in class we discussed how those who feel beauty is objective feel so because there is a certain conviction when we say something is beautiful that leads us to argument. We want to explain and fight for why we think a full, orange moon is the most gorgeous thing we’ve ever seen whereas with a perfume or a milkshake flavor, we don’t care - there is no urge or conviction. This sense of conviction led me to believe that okay, there has to be something actually in this thing that is making it beautiful. However, these readings helped me see some flaws with that way of thinking.  On the other hand, it was also easy to claim beauty is purely subjective because those that feel that beauty is subjective see that what is deemed beautiful can be a singular feeling to the viewer and that there is often wide diversity of judgement on the matter. 

I found a lot of truth in the Kant reading as I interpreted his argument to be a rejection of beauty as being a property of something and also dismissing the idea that it is merely a property of the subject who makes the claim. Kant argues that someone who says this moon is beautiful is really only telling someone something about themselves, not about the moon and I completely agree. However, because saying the moon is beautiful says nothing about the moon but about the viewer, yet so many people think that the moon is beautiful, we see the possibility of a third category or way of thinking of beauty. 

The Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities really me process this idea. We said that primary qualities (ie. shape, location, solidity) belong to the object itself, and secondary qualities (ie. color, taste, feeling) belong to our perception of the object. Also, we agreed that primary qualities cause secondary qualities. I think the interesting thing here that really backs up Kant’s point that beauty is neither objective nor subjective is that beauty can’t be a secondary quality (or subjective) because it can’t point back to a primary quality (the property of the object) that caused it. I think another way to think about this is to say the feeling  can’t point back to a singular primary quality that alone caused it. Yes, I can say the moon is beautiful because of it’s shape and because of how it’s positioned in the sky or because of how big it is in size tonight, but no one quality would be enough to legitimize why it is beautiful. 

Another interesting point, made by Kant, that goes back to a new way of thinking about beauty is honestly how weird of a phenomena it is. He says that the fact that beauty pleases us without regards to being good or agreeable (ie. my sandwich is good for sustenance, agreeable because i’m hungry - but the moon is beautiful and gives us pure pleasure not because it does anything good for us or provides any sort of personal gain but just because). The real existence of something that we find beautiful doesn’t matter it’s just that pure feeling of pleasure that cannot be related to any one property. I think that’s the weird, awesome thing about that makes beautiful things or judgements of the beautiful seem to follow some undeterminable set of rules but at the same time be so unexplainable. I think the key sentence that I took away from these readings was on the first page of “A Critique of Judgment” where Kant says “if we wish to discern whether anything is beautiful or not... we refer to “means of the imagination (acting perhaps in conjunction with understanding). 

I think if we are going to try and define what beauty is and how it works, we have to employ a bit of imagination because nothing else works and alter the way we understand the word. 

***This part below is just an aside because i’m not convinced that what I’m saying is right, but I wrote it in a jumble of thought and figured I should include it***

While I honestly have a difficult time incorporating Devereaux into this argument with any sort of confidence, I think there is something in her writing on “new aesthetics” that can support the argument that there is no one property that makes something beautiful but also that beauty is something more than trivial subjectiveness. Her negative thesis challenges the neutrality of artistic vision arguing that the subject cannot look objectively at art because there is “no pure looking” our gaze is already encoded in gendered expectations; however, her positive thesis (i think) says that art in itself is motivated my male concerns so that it can never be objective in itself anyway. However, in class we discussed saying no to both of these arguments. If we say that the beholder’s vision isn’t the beholder’s vision, we challenge notions of subjectivity. If we say no art isn’t objective because there is no neutral vision than we claim that beauty can’t be a property of art. I think the most interesting claim made was that “everyone can be a subject and an object at times, and that we’re not to avoid objectification of other people but leave room for them to be a subject to themselves.” To me this relates to the “something more” of beauty that throws out both claims and says beauty can be both, it can be more. I also found something significant in her proposed solution to change the way we view art when she references Kuhn’s new pair of spectacles, saying that “the new pair of spectacles provides an education not in what to think but in how.” If we apply this to our questions of beauty, perhaps it is “how” we are thinking about it that needs to be altered to fully understand it. 

2.2 Beauty innate

Is beauty a real property of objects, or is it simply “in the eye of the beholder”?

            I think that most people generally accept that beauty is not an objective quality of a thing but is, instead, a subjective kind of experience or judgment that can (but does not have to) differ from person to person. People rationally know that what they take to be “beautiful” might not be beautiful to someone else. But then why do we, as Kant points out, assert that others ought to agree with us, find it shocking when they don’t, and care enough to try to argue and defend our own aesthetic judgments? Kant says that each person regards his or her own aesthetic judgment of something “as resting on what he [or she] may also presuppose in every other person; and therefore he [or she] must believe that he [or she] has reason for demanding a similar delight from everyone” (134).We even talk about beauty like it is held in the object, despite “knowing” that it is a personal experience to find something beautiful. This is a kind of paradox which I am still not resolved about.

I think that beauty as it is recognized in art requires two things: (1) a disinterested (and therefore unexpected) appreciation for a physical manifestation which (2) leaves an impression in the sense that this appreciation causes us to feel invested in it because of the intensity of the appreciation or its personal implication. This first requirement takes beauty to be as Kant describes it: as a kind of singular experience of something that one seems to have no real explanation for. The second requirement mentioned has to do with having a strong conviction that others would most likely (and should) have a similar experience if presented with the same physical manifestation. I think this second requirement speaks to another point about beauty (and art): that experiencing “the beautiful” is a private phenomenon of public and social creatures.

What I mean by this is that our strong convictions about beauty—our need to defend our aesthetic judgments—stem from our identifying with other people. We generally expect the people around us to approach things with a similar mindset to ours, and so we assume (often correctly, but not always) that they will find beautiful what we find beautiful. Devereaux adds this important underlying social aspect as well, and her writing has persuaded me that even our subconscious reasons for finding beauty in a particular manifestation are not socially neutral. Artworks especially are created and viewed from a kind of gendered (and classed, and raced, and generally socially informed) perspective that we as individuals can never quite shed. I even think that seemingly “naturally” beautiful spectacles, like a sunset, could also be socially informed. Maybe it is still true that every single individual would find a sunset beautiful, but would not think so wholly independently of their social upbringing. This is a rather strange, extreme example, but if we imagine a feral child viewing a sunset, that person might perhaps feel some sort of inexplicable awe but would (perhaps) have no conviction about it. The person would not identify with other people in order to expect them to make the same judgment, and so might not even recognize him or herself as a judgment-maker in the first place. Perhaps such an example is far-fetched, but it seems to me that whenever we make an aesthetic judgment, it is coupled with thoughts about “if others could see this” and with ideas about connection to all humanity through this particular experience of beauty.

Beauty, I think, is similar to Locke’s “secondary qualities” in that it is an experience of a physical manifestation which is not measurable or necessarily explainable but very real. Perhaps beauty is a kind of all-inclusive secondary quality in the sense that it is experienced through all (or many of) the primary qualities combined. Beauty seems to be unlike Wollheim’s description of an emotion expressed through an artwork which represents neither the emotion of the artist while creating nor the viewer while observing. Beauty, instead, seems to be found in the raw experience of something, not in the thing’s way of expression itself. Something expressing sadness could very well evoke sadness in the viewer or not, but such discrepancy does not really weigh on whether or not that person experiences it as beautiful.

Reflection 2.2

Tiegst Ameha

Reflection 4

WC: 939

The question of whether or not beauty is an objective is both more complexly answered and more complicated when brought out of the realm of the lay public and into the realm of philosophy. The philosophers in our readings for this section all make distinctions between what kinds of subjects are even capable of objective beauty in addition to answering the simple question to the question.

In Wollheim’s arguments he makes a distinction between types of art that is even capable of objective beauty. For Wollheim there are the literary and performing arts and the plastic arts. The plastic arts refer to those that are physical objects, such as a painting or sculpture. On the other hand, for literary and performing arts though they can take physical forms, the art works themselves are not physical forms. In a book of poetry the art is in the words, not the book which is only an instantiation of the art, one of many possible forms it may take. In the same way, performances of symphonies and plays do take physical form in the people and sets that perform them, but these are simply one of many ways and times it is done. Wollheim asserts that with these arts, it is impossible to claim objectivity, as the work takes different forms many different times. The plastic arts, however, are capable of an objective standard. He references Locke’s ideas of primary and secondary qualities of objects. Unfortunately, there is a hole in this application of Locke. If beauty is said to be a secondary quality (but nonetheless objective quality) of art works, then what is the corresponding primary quality that it can be said to stem from? Because without having a primary quality to look to, there is no explanation of what your senses interacted with and the quality becomes completely subjective. Wollheim ends in the position that beauty can be an objective quality, but only in the case of plastic arts.This I take issue with, because I think there is valid beauty in the non plastic arts as well as the plastic arts.

A text I find more agreeable in its arguments, is Deveraux’s text. Her arguments are formed around the idea of the male gaze, which she asserts many forms of art and film take on. The idea of the male gaze is that viewers and producers of these various representations take on a gaze which is gendered male. This is not exclusive to male viewers and producers and in fact is quite common in females in addition to males. Deveraux calls into question any claim to neutrality in artistic vision. And you can see this to be true, as there is never a time in which you look upon a piece of art with your background, motives, and expectations completely checked. Furthermore, this idea of the male gaze also implies that male needs, beliefs, and desires dominate art. Beyond the continuation of traditional gender roles in film which could fill a paper on its own, on a base level there is an exceptional amount of phallic symbolism in art in addition to female submissiveness. But how does this figure in with the question of whether or not beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Deveraux uses all of this to make the claim that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, but rather in the societal and cultural conventions in which the beauty and beholder reside. This claim I find to be incredibly agreeable. An example that comes to mind instantly comes when you consider certain European and African countries and their standards of the beautiful. In North America and Western European countries the beautiful is tall and slender and athletic. In these other countries, though, the beautiful is full figured and big hipped, and this makes sense because in those cultures it is a sign of wealth and good health that a person is able to eat enough to be full figured. In the same way, in older cultures it was beautiful to be fair skinned because it signified that you were rich enough not to work in the sun, whereas in western culture now it is beautiful to be tan. In relation to art, you see a huge shift between traditional representational art and say pop art that incorporates kitsch; which is due in large part to the shirt in cultural expectations of beauty.

For Kant, he acknowledges that beauty is a singular and personal judgement. You would think this is a simple no answer to the questions of its objectivity, but Kant being Kant it simply is not. He of course spends a considerable amount of time clarifying that it is an aesthetic judgment and what this entails. First he states that beauty is a disinterested pleasure, one not grounded in any sort of reasoning or utility. Of course this supports the idea that there is no objective way of measuring beauty. But the second claim about beauty as an aesthetic judgement that Kant makes is that it is necessarily a subjective universality. This complicates the question of objectivity. If there is a universality to beauty which we assume, there must be something in beauty that compels us to think this. I certainly don’t agree with Kant, partially for the fact that I don’t see the consistency in his arguments and frankly he confuses me. Deveraux’s explanation of beauty being a product of the cultural biases and horizons of expectations is the one that made the most sense to me and more importantly which I agreed most with.

Beauty is not a property of objects

When I began this unit, I had a much simpler conception of my answer to the question of whether or not beauty is an objective property or in the eye of the beholder. Out of our three readings, Kant and Devereaux have particularly complicated my thinking. My first response was to assert that beauty could not exist without a subject—it was not objective, but purely a subjective thing. An experience, really, that was neither right, nor wrong, but rather depended on all the experiences and natural traits of a person up to the moment in time at which they would interact with any potentially ‘beautiful’ object. Keeping that in mind, I’d like to examine Kant’s ideas in the Critique of Judgment for a while. From Kant we learn that taste is “not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is aesthetic—which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective” (131). So far, so good—taste is about making a judgment concerning beauty, and it is subjective, not objective in nature. To discuss the varying kinds of responses we can have to objects, Kant proposes a tripartite scheme: objects we react to on a purely sensory level are merely “agreeable”; those which we react to in a primarily cognitive manner are “good”; and, those that are in between, and uniquely accessible to humans, are “beautiful” (134). He asserts that “agreeableness is a significant factor even with irrational animals” whereas beauty “has purport and significance only for human beings, i.e. for beings at once animal and rational” (134). Beauty is, therefore, a kind of thing that can be experienced only by humans, with our peculiar blend of rational and animal existence, and judgments of beauty are made “apart from any interest” (134) apart from any interest.

            I wonder about how one can make a judgment of beauty apart from interest. Not only that, but Kant claims that such judgments, though subjective, are universal: “a universality which does not rest upon concepts of the Object...is in no way logical, but aesthetic”; this universality “does not join the predicate of beauty to the concept of the Object taken in its entire logical sphere, and yet does extend this predicate over the whole sphere of judging subjects” (135). This seems to me to conflict with Deveraux’s explanation of how we interact with art, which I shall now examine.

            Devereaux focuses on the ‘male gaze,’ which is simply one of many lenses which we apply to the world. “No vision, not even artistic vision, is neutral vision,” writes Devereaux; “all vision is colored by the ‘spectacles’ through which we see the world” (651). Deveraux does not see any possibility for a separation between observation and interpretation; I am not clear at this point on whether or not Kant’s idea ‘beauty’ rests in a space amalgamating observation and interpretation, or free of both in some way (I take the latter possibility from the notion of ‘disinterested’ judgment). A judgment, after all, implies both examining the thing to be judged, and making a decision; so it is difficult for me to understand how Kant thinks one can make a judgment independent of background beliefs. Devereaux, it seems, disagrees: “Observation is always conditioned by perspective and expectation,” she says, arguing later that we must view artwork not as “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” but as part of “the everyday realm of social and political praxis” (651,59). Furthermore, and in direct contrast to Kant’s talk of “subjective universality,” Devereaux questions some ideas that I think Kant believes to hold. She questions whether or not there is a ‘pure’ aesthetic moment, or if art can speak to something universally apprehensible among human subjects (659). Perhaps most problematically for Kant’s schema, she denies that “reading or viewing” art can be “value-neutral,” or “neutral activities” (660). Both instances of the term ‘neutral’ in relation to art seem to me at least plausibly to represent that state of ‘disinterest’ that Kant thought must be reached to make a proper judgment of beauty, and Devereaux seems to reject its plausibility. I find myself aligning with Deveraux; making a judgment divorced from background beliefs is not something I see as possible. Nevertheless, my exploration of Kant has been very brief, and I may have misunderstood what he is getting at. At any rate, the two seem to agree on our question in its simplest form, and I take my cue from them: beauty is something subjective, being felt by the subject, and not an objective property of art, even if evoked by such objects.

Reflection 2

Is beauty a real property of objects, or is it simply “in the eye of the beholder”?

Whether beauty is a property of objects or is “in the eye of the beholder”, as mentioned earlier, is more a question about if beauty is an objective property or a subjective property. I believe that beauty is a subjective experience; however, there seem to be aspects in the contemplation of beauty that adhere to objective properties. To effectively argue or support my opinion using the authors we read I must connect their ideas together, for I think that alone it is difficult to capture not only the reasons for why beauty is subjective but also its impact in our modern world. To do this I will highlight some critical points of each author which tie into the question at hand. First I will begin by discussing what Richard Wollheim discussed in his essay “Art and its Objects”. He begins his essay by introducing the “physical-object hypothesis”, a theory that claims that all works of arts are physical objects. He gives examples of why this theory is not plausible by explaining that there are works of art that do not have a “physical” instance of what is truly the work of art, “For the ordinary explanation of how we come to group copies or performances as being of this book or of that opera is by reference to something else, something other than themselves, to which they stand in some special relation.” (Cahn & Meskin 468). Here Wollheim is explaining how copies of the book Ulysses and performances of the opera Der Rosenkavalier are copies that in some sense imitate the true idea of the book and opera. Needless to say this parallels the theory of forms that Plato touches on in his discussion about the arts and imitation.

Now Wollheim gives us critical insight into how we interpret art; however, his theories alone will not answer the question about beauty being a property of objects because not all objects are works of art, therefore we must expand our conversation beyond simply the realm of artwork. The feminist writer Mary Devereaux writes about how in today’s media “male gaze” has dominated the ways in which we view women, resulting in the degradation of many women and men alike. In discussing the qualities and consequences of “male gaze” Devereaux gives us a very handy definition which not only expands us beyond artworks but also ties into the later Kantian ideas which discuss beauty, “Objectification, as I am using the term, means no more than to make something the object of my gaze.” (Cahn & Meskin 656). This allows us to consider beauty beyond the realm of artwork, for a person can essentially make anything the object of their gaze. I feel many people carry the belief that artwork is made to be beautiful, which to a degree is sometimes true; however, now we can consider beauty in other things such as people. Devereaux continues in her essay to speak of the consequences of “male gaze” by explaining how it degrades women by exploiting their sexuality which oppresses them because of their portrayal in media as merely objects of male gaze.

“Male gaze” is not simply harmful because of the oppression it causes to women and some men, but is also a systematized construct which has distorted what true contemplation of the beautiful should be. If we want to ask what contemplation of the beautiful looks like, I believe we must look to Kant and his serious consideration of beauty. Diving right into his “Critique of Judgment” Kant explains that beauty is an aesthetic claim and that such claims are subjective. This is because claiming that an object is beautiful gives us no concept of what the object is, and therefore is a quality that does not belong to the object itself. It is important to note that beauty is not a feeling itself that is experienced but is something higher which evokes certain feelings when we see it. In his critique he says, “Everyone must allow that a judgment on the beautiful which is tinged with the slightest interest, is very partial and not a pure judgment of taste.” (Cahn & Meskin 132). He says that if a person wants to make a pure claim of beauty they must be indifferent to the existence of the object in question, or else one could say they are biased based on the usefulness of the object or even the cultural influences they have. This gets us back to “male gaze” which is a construct that inherently contains interest in determining what is beautiful in modern media. This gendered gaze dominates media and influences us culturally so intensely that both men and women participate in male gaze, and this influences us to make claims about beauty that are tinged with the usefulness or agreeableness of women. Devereaux explains that “male gaze” reflects male desires, values, and beliefs; and this shows itself when women are portrayed as merely objects that serve to further their male counterparts (which also results in the woman’s subjectivity being belittled). This gaze extends also to simple paintings of nature because we have gendered it and so enact “male gaze” on works that do not even contain a human presence.

In conclusion we find that beauty seems to be a subjective experience that is not a quality that belongs to objects. For a person to make a pure judgment of beauty they must be indifferent to the object and cannot generalize to all objects that belong in the same class (a point which both Kant and Wollheim address in slightly different examples). If beauty were an objective property of objects it would inform us of some aspect of what the object is. It is the case, however, that when experience something that is beautiful we cannot pinpoint just what makes it beautiful, especially when it evokes intense feelings of awe. There rises an issue in our modern society where “male gaze” has culturally influenced the way in which we contemplate beauty which has degrees of interest embedded within it. It is not necessarily a problem that everyone faces but the mass majority of people tend to face. There is strong reason to believe beauty is subjective; however, there are complications which may suggest otherwise. Wollheim introduces a thought experiment where we consider a work of art without considering the feelings of the creator or the viewer, and reasonable we can conclude that artworks are able to express emotions free from human contemplation (or rather human subjective emotions) and so it could be the case that beauty, too, can be expressed. Kant also explains that even though we experience beauty subjectively we discuss it with one another as if what we consider to be beautiful is universally accepted. We firmly accept an object as beautiful and find it strange when someone does not agree. What we see then is that even though beauty seems to be a subjective property there seems to be something objective working behind the scenes.