The relationship between beauty and art has always been a highly contentious issue among scholars and artists because of the changing concept of art throughout the years. Indeed, art and aesthetics and the quest for beauty has always been historically linked since the art was conceived as the instrument used by men to seek beauty, the latter being considered one of the virtues to which human activity must be directed. Certainly, from Plato and the Greek thinkers beauty has been designed as what enables man to transcend his human condition and approach the divine, which leads the soul towards truth, understood as moral virtue par excellence. Aristotle, in fact, when speaking of art, says that one must distinguish between the act of production (the art itself) and the result of such production (the work), although any the creative process must be conducted to find the "beautiful" ("Ethics Nicomachean). Thus, according to the conventional notion of art the artist is the intermediary or intercessor between the worldly and the divine sphere, which was conceived as the maximum aspiration of humankind: the art was donated the instrument used for s to approach the beauty, the virtues of the integral divine.
The objective of approaching the divine through art has been one of the most important characteristics of medieval art, although art now make use of it for the purpose of the work himself. Indeed, painters and sculptors create works to praise God and to approach virtue (beauty), whose object is composed by episodes of sacred history. Thus, the artist seeks beauty through his works, which have a religious purpose, to sing the glory and greatness of God. Consequently, only the fine art is good because this is valid only to praise God.
However, the Renaissance notion that art is radically transformed due to the change in the concept of man and the world. Indeed, man becomes the center of creation instead of God. The works are increasingly worldly and sifted science, although the artist is still trying to find beauty, it is now conceived as an empirical or sensory pleasure and not as a virtue. We can also find such a secularization of the search for beauty in art in the Enlightenment, which transformed the art into an instrument for the pursuit of virtue, albeit under a rationalist. Certainly, the Enlightenment manage to put reason in place of God and therefore the virtues that should be sought now are no longer theological virtues (faith, hope and charity), cardinal (prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude) or moral principles or virtues but born of the Revolution and the Enlightenment. Thus, freedom, equality, truth and justice are the goals of any creative act, although these are goals designed to sense and liberal point of Rousseau: the deification of reason cancels beauty as a moral value transcendent and absolute or to transform it into the result of a rational process. The look is perceived as what everyone through the sensory perception of reality under the scrutiny of reason, considered as such. Thus, with the birth of philosophical relativism begins the dispute over the notion of art.
But since the late nineteenth century relativism has increased considerably and therefore beauty is subjective and personal value, which is what the artist sees it as such. Beauty or "beautiful" is more objective and measurable value that can inspire the creative process of the artist and the notion of art itself: the relationship between art and beauty as the concept falters the latter becomes relative and subjective.
Indeed, there are certain artistic movements that rely on finding the definition of art itself, such as art conceptual. Thus, this group of artists, among which one can find Joseph Kosuth, On Kawara, or Sol LeWitt, first requirement is to analyze what allows the art to be art, that is to say, the quintessence art. According Kosuth, for example, "it is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics involves judgments on the perception of the world in general", so "other functions apparent in the art [of painting religious themes, portraits of aristocrats or ornamental function, among others] were using art to conceal art. (...) The considerations aesthetics are always extraneous to the function of an object or its purpose. "Thus, we can see that since Duchamp and his" readymade "the interests of art no longer about the shape of language, that is to say, the external appearance or aesthetic of the work, but on what is said by Kosuth makes "the whole art (after Duchamp) is conceptual."
Certainly, it can be seen through analysis of the evolution of the concept of art over the years so that the relationship between art and challenged beauty has its origin in relativism, in the subjectification of reality. Indeed, if one eliminates the concepts, principles and values objectives, we eliminate the essence of things and reality, the latter being a single act of will, a single cognitive act. Subjectivism in the beauty that art has lost the most important component of its nature, that is to say the purpose of art embodied in the pursuit of beauty as superior value. All this brought to an extreme relativism has been the cause of conceptual deconstruction, like Descartes, who may question Teller des Notions sur l'art ou le beau jusqu'à l'absurde (par example, Joseph Kosuth tautology of "l'art est la définition de l'art") et qui a conduit aux Notions conceptuellement vines. La question qu'on doit poser n'est pas celle was savoir s'il joins relation exists between nécessaire l'art et la beauté, mais celle of définition même de l'art.
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