Aesthetics
In which I get judgy with our Vocab Word o'th'Week, and discover more vocab words as I rant.
Judging Beauty
(This original post appeared on a pen-named blog in February of 2019, and has been much expanded from there.)
The two screens facing me side by side at the sports bar are showing hockey and figure skating, respectively, in parallel. Both sports, obviously, feature ice skating and scoring points. But other than that, they couldn’t be more different.
In fact, I’d question the calling of figure skating a sport. There’s an appealing aesthetic to both movements I see on both screens, but only one of them is actually being scored on the beauty of the movements as well as the difficulty of the execution of same.
Costume differences aside, the hockey is just as aesthetically pleasing because of the concision and focus of the skating moves involved. Also if you happen to enjoy watching combative arts? The fights involved in hockey do have a particular aesthetic appeal. But the points scored in hockey have everything to do with getting the puck in the opposing team’s net. The spareness and quickness and speed and difficulty level of the moves in hockey that are so pleasing to the eye are all focused on this goal (heh). (Well I mean maybe the fights aren’t focused on that objective, specifically, but. You get my point.)
The figure skaters are also awarded points, though they’re competing solo (on the screen I’m looking at). A big part of how they score is on the difficulty level and array of big trick moves of various kinds, whether the skaters execute them correctly, land on their feet not their asses out of them, etc. But another good sized chunk of how they acquire these points is how beautifully they skate.
What does that mean, though? It’s not only technical prowess—the judges are looking for certain requirements done technically correctly, sure, but doing them well? That’s a whole ‘nother monster.
Many people, when interrogating me on my arts-and-humanities teaching profession, ask how I can grade all these kids on their artistic works, when they’re still learning and young and isn’t it all subjective anyway.
It is subjective, art. But I still need to give grades to my students. I still score them. Some of them do better than others. Nobody wins, in this case, but. It’s still a score. A measurement. A ranking.
Part of this is basic technical stuff: do they have their lines memorized, did they write to the assignment requirements, did they spell everything correctly, did they hand it in on time or not at all, etc. but that’s the easy part. That’s all technique*. That’s getting the puck in the net. I also grade them on how good they are, though.
Of course, I take all kinds of things into account when I’m grading my students: how old are they, how much experience do they have, what’s the difficulty level of the piece they’re attempting to execute, etc. I mean, two 18 year olds attempting to perform scenes from 1775 Restoration comedy The Rivals aren’t going to cut it to the same level as highly trained 30-somethings in a professional troupe. But.
There is still an aesthetic standard I hold the 18 year olds to, and it isn’t any different than what the 30-something professionals are expected to accomplish at bare minimum. But I know that those 18 year olds won’t be able to execute to the level of what the professionals can (they’re still in training, after all), and yet I have to give them a grade, regardless. And what I’m grading them on is the quality of the art they’ve presented.
Postmodernists and progressives will call this unfair. Who am I, they ask, who is any one (especially white) person to dictate what art is “good?” For that matter, what is “art,” anyway, man?
I’ve ranted about this before—the very first piece I ever posted here on Substack was a similar rant about this type of thing (“Actually, Don’t”). Back when it was first posted on the blog, it went out onto my social media, and I know, I know, you’re never supposed to read the comments, but I did so, on a friend’s reshare. Seems like I rubbed a lot of people wrong, and commenters called me pedantic, an asshole, and how can you judge *real* art, man?
Thing is, you can. Dare I say: you should? Who gets to? Qualified people. Who’s qualified? People who know what goes into an art, and can judge based on many factors, including their own (erstwhile or current) prowess in it. Not just one person. Not just white people. Not just men. There are 9 judges appointed for figure skating, for example, and they score the skaters within two categories: technical and program component. I was curious, writing all this so far, so I looked over at EuroSport to see if I could collect some specifics, if not a rubric. Here’s what I found:
The PCS [program component score] scale covers:
-Skating skills
-Transitions (footwork and movement that link all elements)
-Performance (choreography, emotion)
-Composition (how the arrangement is put together)
-Performance and execution (style, precision, personality)
This was fascinating information to discover, but I have many questions:
How does one grade a performer’s “personality?” Also, there are apparently different components to men’s and women’s scoring. This particular site doesn’t say what those are. Any non-binary performers involved? Is there a third set of rules for them? Why the gendered rules anyway?
And then, ice dancing is a different monster altogether, too: the difference, according to EuroSport, is that the judges are looking for different things (like “twizzles,” which is a new vocab word to me that I love muchly). But this sounds pretty vague, doesn’t it? “Choreography and emotion?” What specifically about those things are judges looking for? Every figure skater they see has choreography—what about the choreography gives one skater an 8 and another a 9.5? “How the arrangement is put together?” Do they mean, more or less complex? Some vague idea of pleasing to the eye? To all 9 judges’ eye?
Art appreciation doesn’t have a scoring component, and I wonder if that’s what makes figure skating into a sport—the mere fact that it gets scored and not just judged and reviewed like a visual or performing art does. Is that what award shows are, an alternative to a grade or a score?
But if we’re not talking about scores when we judge art, we still are ranking different works and different artists. We still mark some art as “good” and some not. How do we show this? By who gets published. Who gets put up in which galleries? Which books or actors receive awards? Which movies get made and released on which platforms? Which works get included in canon? Okay actually the canon (and publishing) discussion is a whole ‘nother article.** And of course we are remiss if we don’t talk about the expansion of canon now including marginalized voices of so many kinds, that before were never considered in established norms of aesthetics because White Men (™). But, again, that’s another article, and that one in particular is one best written by someone not me. I am a woman, and do fall under the LGBTQ rainbow, and so can speak to this issue a bit, but I feel like if I get too far into the “yay for BIPOC artists” path, it becomes a road for…well, for a BIPOC artist.
Beauty is a formula: Technique plus passion. Have the one alone, you can win a number of points, but never a perfect 10. Have only the other, you can’t even execute your art—can’t even stand up in your skates. Theatre artist Jerzy Grotowski discussed this in detail decades ago, insisting that actorly skill is the single most important thing needed for good theatre—in fact, his concept of the Poor Theatre says that that’s all that’s needed. One of my favorite acting professors worked almost like this—he had an extreme precision to his directing work especially, and I loved it. I thrived under his rigor, even while other fellow students in my same cohort felt stifled, too-controlled. One of them even called his blocking “mathematic and robotic.” I never understood this—my creative work flourished under all that control, and I did some of my best young work learning from his discipline. I blossomed as an actor, using that rigid framework to stretch my actorly canvas.***
Deconstructionists and Postmodernists will try to dismantle all this structure, claiming it’s punishingly rigid, stifling, killing to the creativity. Anyone who does any other style of art, though, will say differently: it’s been well established that structure allows creativity to better flow. It’s like installing a trellis in a garden, or putting a cake ring around a confection. Ask any improvisation practitioner: if you have no structure whatsoever, the work will collapse into a wet rag. Yes, the Establishment often needs some correction (White Men [™] again), but if art keeps getting taken apart and then apart and then apart again, it dissipates and dissolves into a fully deconstructed nothingness.
“Who gets to call it art?” I do. Why? Because I’m an expert, dammit.
Anyway, I’m still watching both screens full of skaters and they’re both very pretty.
*Except that’s not actually technique, that’s more logistics. What’s good acting technique, movement technique, writing technique? A piece of writing with perfect technical grammar isn’t always a good piece of writing—the recent uproar about AIs like ChatGPT shows this. Parisians in the late 1800s found what would later be called Impressionist painting to be repulsive, awful, and unfinished. This is an art movement that lay lovers and art experts alike today agree is some of the best and most beautiful work ever made. In that same time period, photography was considered pedestrian, mechanical, technical. Certainly not an art form. And what did the Impressionists do when the establishment Salon rejected all their experimental art? Why, they made a Salon of their own—the Salon des Refusés.
**I’ve also tipsily hashed this out a few times on my friend’s podcast, The Outrider. Give it a listen, and follow us, yeah?
***shoutout to Joel G. Fink. He had lovely things to say in my DMs about “Actually, Don’t,” too, and I’m heartened and heart-warmed to hear him continue to engage with my work, nearly 30 years (!!) later.
I can tell that I will be thinking about this post fir weeks.