Beauty is a property of things perceived by humans, who can judge and evaluate abstractly. And since beauty is considered to be a culmination or perfection of specific qualities or characteristics, there is also ugly, the deficiency of those qualities. But these qualities are socially valued. Remember: there are no ugly things "in Nature."
Artworks embody, make concrete in one way or another, these qualities of beauty and thus isolate them, as it were, from the demands of utility, so that beauty, grace, radiance, quiddity even, can be contemplated. That's what Aristotle means by catharsis and vicarious violence.
Because artworks do not need to be denotatively truthful—because works of art are fictions, because they do not have to have a utilitarian purpose, because they are free creations—the maker can concentrate on the accidental qualities of appearances in order to manipulate the degree to which beauty or formal wholeness or another property can exhibit itself.
Art moralizes nature. The artist takes the visible qualities of things as his model and forms and arranges them in the work of art in such a way to produce an order to these qualities. Canons and rules and guidelines and other prescriptions are the socializing of the raw, unordered, un-beauty and un-ugly of nature, the making of preferences for and against ways of perceiving these qualities. Art is a social endeavor, and by being social, it subjects its materials (the stuff of Nature) to the mores of the group, of the society. Art moralizes nature, imposing preferences on colors and shapes and forms that, in the wild, occur for other reasons and purposes.
And Nature, which precedes art, is indifferent to these moral rules of Art. From time to time, Nature rebuffs art, Nature supersedes art, Nature is superabundantly more than art, defeating the rules of art: There are no binding canons of portrayal in Nature. Ultimately, Nature demoralizes art—i.e., Nature de-moralizes art.
Art moralizes Nature. Nature demoralizes Art.
Good to see you blogging, Michael. I've been investigating the phenomenon of creativity lately, reading Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit," and revisiting Santayana, other contemporary philosophers. Especially intrigued by art as social conscience (Guernica came to mind in my latest post). Looking forward to more!
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