# Pulchrism: Championing Beauty as the Purpose of Art/Chapter 4

​Case Study of Another Artist in Practice
For the past ten months, I have been sitting for a well-known portrait artist — Allan Ramsay — as he paints my portrait. I have been very impressed with his ability to recreate what he sees — whilst adding gracious proportion and colour to his completed works. He exhibits a strong and capable aesthetic. We have discussed the topic of aesthetics and beauty, particularly in their relation to 'contemporary' conceptual art. He believes that before we are able to intellectually rationalize our perception of art, we have already assessed it based on intuition or feeling, and that this is an ​inextricable process. This can justify my stance on the importance of beauty to art, as it places the emphasis on the bridge between the rational and irrational, and gives Beauty a place to breathe, where it is not stifled by insistence on explicability.
Allan said he was influenced in this regard by French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was concerned with the constitution of meaning in human experience. Allan told me that Merleau-Ponty gave visceral experience the priority in human aesthetic experience of art. So basically, Merleau-Ponty stated that all of the rationalization and interpretation of (Modern) conceptual art naturally comes after the initial instinctive reaction to it. This native reaction is where the true value of art lies, and not in all of the concocted pseudo-intellectual justification which has become so prevalent among conceptual art circles of critique.
Jesse Waugh Pseudonarcissus 2014 Oil on canvas
Allan has gone so far as to say that he believes most conceptual, contemporary art requires onlookers to "check their eyeballs in at the door", and has even come up with a conceptual piece himself as a logical continuation of the concept: a jar of eyeballs placed at a hypothetical gallery entrance, with a sign dictating that visitors must deposit their eyes in the jar at the door in order to prevent them from being able to engage in any truly rational critical thinking which would almost invariably lead them to conclude that what they are viewing is nonsensical rubbish – that the emperor has no clothes. His point is that true critical thinking is not actually allowed in conceptual art venues, because if it were, virtually none of the "art" on display could possibly be seen to have any real merit.
​My favourite quote from Allan Ramsay is: "People don't plant ugly flowers." He makes a good point when he asks "Why do people come to Brighton Beach?" He states that people come down from London to Brighton to see the beautiful sea, sky and sand [stones rather]. And this is an excellent point which has also been stated by my academic mentor Helen Kennedy: their simply must be some agreement amongst people in general that the sun setting over the sea is beautiful. Does this not suggest some sort of objectivity to beauty? If so, then how can beauty be entirely subjective, as is enforced as a concept by so many practitioners of art in our current era? Are those subjectivists – as I like to label them – possibly mistaken in their fascist, anti-beauty dogma? Or is beauty purely relative as they so forcefully emphasize?
Jesse Waugh Brighton Butterfly: Red Admiral 2014 Oil on canvas