tate, was the official aesthetic of the medieval social order.
b. the politics of beauty: aesthetics and grotesque realism
By the “aesthetic” we mean ideas as to what defines the beautiful, and in general, the realm of
art and high culture generally. Aesthetics convey and codify more than mere beauty; rather, they also communicate the highest values of a culture. Aesthetics, and the world of art and
creative representation in general, are not innocent of politics, much as we tend to think of art
as a realm removed from real life. On the contrary, art gives form to values, beliefs, and
ideologies with remarkable significance for the real world. Think of the way in which the Italian
Fascists made use of the Futurist movement for propaganda purposes, or the Nazis burned
modern art because of its alleged corrupting influence on the purity of the Reich. Think of the
way in which Hollywood, for good and ill, communicates the ideals of American culture around
the world, ensuring a global audience for themes relating to American politics, consumerism,
and worldview.
The aesthetic—the domain of beauty—is a superb vehicle for ideology because we both
internalize its messages deeply, and we don’t think of beauty as itself being ideological.
Beauty simply “is”—it doesn’t have to explain itself. It doesn’t have to lie or work hard to attract
us to it—beauty draws the eye without resistance. For example, celebrity culture today is a
“beautiful” me英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】ans of conveying ideas about what it means to be human, and again, one with
significant ideological power that is hardly recognized in pop cultural trivia about a star’s weigh
gain, divorce, or substance abuse.
If medieval elites used the beauty of Gothic architecture, the Catholic mass, the representation
of the good Christian as someone obedient and pious, and other means to align themselves
with the aesthetic, peasants represented an anti-aesthetic. To the monumental dimensions of
the cathedral and the self-restraint of the clergy, the peasants projected in return their dirt,
disorder, ugliness, and excess. This was on display primarily in festivals held at Easter,
harvest, Christmas, or other times of license allowed by the Church. The spectacular nature of
what Bakhtin calls “grotesque realism”—the power of ugliness—is apparent in the 1559
painting by Pieter Bruegel, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. Here is a detail from that
painting showing a drunken peasant man in comic costume and riding a barrel.
full colour copy of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/B/bruegel/carnival_and_lent.jpg.html
Medieval peasants would mock the official aesthetic and the values that supported what was
deemed beautiful in medieval culture. They would don costumes, stage bawdy plays, drink and
eat to excess, parade in public, and mock nobility and clergy alike. While these rituals of
inversio
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