We use cookies on this website, you can read about them here. To use the website as intended please... ACCEPT COOKIES
UAL Research Online

‘The Best of Moralists’: Hogarth, Bentham and the Anti-Aesthetic

Quinn, Malcolm. (2023) ‘The Best of Moralists’: Hogarth, Bentham and the Anti-Aesthetic. In: Finding Hogarth in the Humanities, 27 March 2023, Hogarth House London.

Type of Research: Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item
Creators: Quinn, Malcolm.
Description:

This was a paper delivered at the one-day interdisciplinary conference which analyses the impact of artist and social critic William Hogarth.

It focused looking at Hogarth through the lens of Jeremy Bentham's philosophy. Bentham once wrote of William Hogarth ‘That admirable artist was one of the best of moralists.’ I argued that Bentham’s praise for Hogarth’s moral insight, which was made with reference to the prints Beer Street and Gin Lane, nonetheless exposed contradictions in the position that Hogarth adopted in his treatise The Analysis of Beauty. In this treatise, Hogarth attempted a rational, impartial analysis of the truth of beauty, to assist the ordinary observer and defeat the artificial rules of art promoted by connoisseurs of art. In advocating an aesthetics of ‘plain truth’, Hogarth argues that the body of a living woman is more beautiful than a statue of Venus and that the form of a woman’s body surpasses that of a man. In Jeremy Bentham’s terms, however, a definition of beauty based on reproductive sexuality was not tenable, because sexuality was an inclination without a fixed object, a ‘sixth sense’ that ignored the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly. In Beer Street and Gin Lane, on the other hand, we see Hogarth approach truth in a different way, by outlining the social harms that result from a predilection for gin, and the social benefits that derive from substituting this predilection for the consumption of beer. The moral distinction between Gin Lane and Beer Street is not guided by a difference between the ugly and the beautiful, but rather by the difference between the pleasure of a predilection and the social mischief it may cause. In Bentham’s view, to be ‘the best of moralists’ Hogarth had to define the social power of art through an analysis of the ethics of urban life that does not rely on normative judgments of beauty.

Official Website: https://hogarthshouse.org/events_exhibitions/finding-hogarth-in-the-humanities/
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: aesthetics, utilitarianism
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > Chelsea College of Arts
Date: 27 March 2023
Event Location: Hogarth House London
Date Deposited: 13 Jan 2025 11:22
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2025 11:22
Item ID: 23224
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23224

Repository Staff Only: item control page | University Staff: Request a correction