to an extent that had never been witnessed before. When it came to priorities, beauty began to take a back seat during what was essentially a second renaissance that saw the role of the artist change from that of an artisan to something more akin to a cross between an avant-gardist, an activist, a revolutionary and an entertainer. Professor Terry Eagleton famously said that `to the avant-garde truth is a lie, morality stinks and beauty is shit’. The task of art, he believes, `is to be a hammer, not a mirror…Art’s job is to unleash contradictions . . . to shatter and wound.’
Eleni Gemtou of the University of Athens summed up the situation relating to beauty and art perfectly in her paper “The Role of Beauty in Art and Science’ in which she said: ‘Many are the works of art that have been created in order to satisfy philosophical and intellectual concerns, to provoke, to alert or even to serve social, religious and political objectives. In these cases, beauty and aesthetic satisfaction are either coincidental or completely absent.’ Gemtou then goes on to say ‘In the first half of the 20th century, art disengaged from its role to represent reality and to express beauty. Artists and movements expressing various world-perceptions, such as Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism etc. abolished traditional styles and introduced the principles of two – dimensionality, deformity, splitting and the projection of the process on the completed work. Form functioned as a revolutionary vehicle, while the subject in many works of art acquired a secondary and even a non-existent role (abstraction)’ (THE ROLE OF BEAUTY IN ART AND SCIENCE by Eleni Gemtou)
**Nicholas Forrest is an art market analyst, art critic and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the founder of http://www.artmarketblog.com, writes the art column for the magazine Antiques and Collectibles for Pleasure and Profit and contributes to many other publications
