Art inherits a primary mission for humanity, which is to incite it to love and peace.

For the record…

Beauty and art were brutally separated by Marcel Duchamp with his urinal (see Fontaine). Not all artistic work, however interesting, necessarily relates to the experience of beauty.

We have a filter that separates the ugly from the beautiful, with the information sent to different regions of the brain.

Neurobiologist Semir Zeki states that beauty is desire and love, and that there is a mirror association with beauty. When people look at a person or object they desire, they use the same pathway as for beauty. So there is a common area of activity localised in the medial orbitofrontal cortex; these areas are activated when one experiences beauty, but they are also sometimes active when a person looks at individuals of whom they are really fond.

Contextual deviations in a society in crisis

Today, deviations and confusions are to be avoided. Amalgamations have become common, and these shortcuts reflect the dysfunction of our societies.

- I note that beauty is sometimes perceived by some people as being reserved for the rich, and this makes art a mark of division between social categories. Studies of a population living in poor ANRU^[1] zones show that disadvantaged social categories want to break away from this rule, because they do not want to be associated with a social marker that presents them as belonging to a dominated class. The vast majority of people living in these areas want the same benefits as the better-off classes.  

- Some of us feel that if there is an 80% of women in artists’ works, and beautiful women at that, this is the mark of a reduction in the status of women, with them being reduced to the role of women as objects. People sometimes do not know how a human being functions. All neuroscientists agree on this, but I would like to quote Anjan Chatterjee who explains in his talk “How your brain decides what is beautiful”, that a person who is considered beautiful is associated with a person who has qualities and values. For example, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is an allegory of female beauty and purity. The recognition of beauty leads us to see the person as more intelligent, as having more values and common sense, as being deeper and more perfect…

In our appraisal, they will have more inner qualities than others.

Art must contribute to a better world

The people involved in some way in the art world represent 2% of the population. These players sometimes consider beauty to be an embellishment that hides the substance: it can be considered superficial, while bad taste, kitsch, is a claim that has remained very present in the art world. The art world has banned the word ‘beautiful’, but it has remained in the dictionary and in the collective consciousness. The study Art, Aesthetics and the Brain by the neuroscientists Helmut Leder and Marcos Nadal mentions that people who observe works of art associate them with their reference to beauty. Contrary to what Kasimir Malevich thought when he painted his Black square on a white background, the work is not the subject, but the subject is the effect it produces in the viewer.

In conclusion, Semi Zeki explains that beauty activates the same areas as love and desire, and that our brain couples these together. Art therefore inherits a primary mission for humanity, which is to promote love and peace.

When Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “beauty will save the world”, he hit the nail on the head: artists must make the world more beautiful to help spread love and joy, but also to strengthen our will to live and our ability to survive events.

 05-05-2023 Guillaume Bottazzi