Comments on: Hennessy Youngman on Beauty

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:50:00 +0000

Fair enough. We must have different references in mind though. I’m thinking of male and female nudity in art that highlights sensuality in addition to strength/weakness.

Paintings where it is vague and somewhat subjective what the artist is trying to convey with nudity – whether the depiction is sexual or not, and helpless or empowering.

By: Alex Odell

Alex Odell — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:25:00 +0000

Not all nudity is painted equal. Male nudity in paintings highlights the man’s strength, whereas female nudity often sexualizes or depowers them, i.e., naked, helpless women, with clothed, powerful men.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:47:00 +0000

Classical paintings meaning when? It makes me think of neoclassical paintings, and there is a potent amount of both male and female nudity in those.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Hey, I didn’t say I found it offensive, just couldn’t tell when he was being tongue-in-cheek and when he wasn’t. His use of irony is clearer and more effective in a couple of his other videos that I saw. It also would have helped to know more about him before I saw the video.

By: diamonddame

diamonddame — Fri, 11 May 2012 17:21:00 +0000

if you’re a subscriber to his videos you’d know that all his videos are tongue in cheek. He also tells black artists to just exploit images from slavery or ghetto culture to advance. or just make black people look silly doing white people things and give it a clever pseudo intellectual name. idk like exploring the young African male in neo-idustrialized professional america.. (just throw words that sounds cool together with exploring to start)

what ever he says is exactly what he doesn’t mean..

so idk it didn’t really come off as offensive so much as him saying plainly what the art world thinks and expects to the point of it sounds as ridiculous as it IS.

works for me.

By: Alex Odell

Alex Odell — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:36:00 +0000

She could be referring to the fact that classical paintings would depict women naked 90% of the time.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:18:00 +0000

This video should come with a primer on Hennessy Youngman. It took me a while to figure out he was being ironic, and even then he oscillates uncomfortably between validating social construcitions of beauty and insisting art must be beautiful, and criticising those ideas. Now that I’ve looked up Jayson Musson and some of his videos, I can appreciate him more, but this video is not that good.

In response to PinkWithIndignation: When was art ever just about female nudity, beauty, and sexuality/sexiness? Except for times (and regions) of extreme censorship, there are just as many influential depictions of men in the same vein.

By: guest

guest — Fri, 11 May 2012 05:21:00 +0000

Yeah, I usually like Hennessey, but he was out of line here, even if he thought he was being ironic.

In his introductory chapter, Bram Dijkstra in Idols of Perversity talks about (and shows) that up until the early 19th century there were plenty of images of women (created by male painters) as actual real live individual human beings. Something happened, though to make that unacceptable to the ‘high art’ world–from then on images of women’s bodies were only created as representatives of Beauty (or really of Sex).

By: PinkWithIndignation

PinkWithIndignation — Fri, 11 May 2012 03:26:00 +0000

So beauty=sexy females, because art patrons are all coming from the perspective of the male gaze. Truly a revolutionary notion. Seriously, I hate boobs in art. I do not want to see other females naked, I dislike it. Art with naked ladies in it can be attractive, but 99% of the time it just makes me feel like being in the locker room at the Y. There’s nothing inherently wrong with nudity, but, I just have to ask…what makes naked ladies so great that they are all over art (besides patriarchy blah blah) and yet there are very few sexy naked men in what is considered great art (no, David does not count)? Let alone erect penises. I will tell you: nothing. There is nothing special or magical about the female body. It does all the gross stuff (and more!) of male bodies. It is full of flaws. It grows old and dies like every other body. It’s just a type of body we’ve been told is special and magical. Females have been reduced to their outward appearance so much that we are treated like art exhibits every day, to be judged on how well we execute our look. People think they are entitled to see us that way, to scrutinize us as they would objects of art in a museum, and to assign us value accordingly. So much that even heterosexual and bisexual women are drawn to painting naked females and breasts. We are not encouraged to make art about what we desire. We create what society tells us is desirable, what we have been told to believe is desirable, and we want to create what is desirable because we desire success, and if we get approval for the execution of that art it becomes more desirable, and people think that is the key to great art and so it is a vicious cycle. The art he likes is the objectification of women that has been going on for hundreds of years, probably thousands. Isn’t it time we find a new standard of beauty? And those paintings of the women as food? I hate them. They are shallow and exploitative and I have seen that kind of thing done to death. If you want to make great art, make something we haven’t seen before, or haven’t seen enough of.