Interesting (ii)

(...)The strongest, most successful move against beauty was in the arts: beauty - and the caring about beauty - was restrictive; as the current idiom has it, elitist. Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was "interesting".

Of course, when people said a work of art was interesting, this did not mean that they necessarily liked it - much less that they thought it beautiful. It usually meant no more than they thought they ought to like it. Or that they like it, sort of, even though it wasn't beautiful.

Or they might describe something as interesting to avoid the banality of calling it beautiful. Photography was the art where "the interesting" first triumphed, and early on: the new, photographic way of seeing proposed everything as a potential subject for the camera. The beautiful could not have yielded such a range of subjects; and it soon came to seem uncool to boot as a judgment. Of a photograph of a sunset, a beautiful sunset, anyone with minimal standards of verbal sophistication might well prefer to say, "Yes, the photograph is interesting."

What is interesting? Mostly, what has not previously been thought beautiful (or good). The sick are interesting, as Nietzsche points out. The wicked, too. To name something as interesting implies challenging old orders of praise; such judgments aspire to be found insolent or at least ingenious. Connoisseurs of "the interesting" - whose antonym is "the boring" - appreciate clash, not harmony. Liberalism is boring, declares Carl Schmitt in The Concept of the Political, written in 1932. (The following year he joined the Nazi Party.) A politics conducted according to liberal principles lacks drama, flavor, conflict, while strong autocratic politics - and war - are interesting.

Long use of "the interesting" as a criterion of value has, inevitably, weakened its transgressive bite.(...)One calls something interesting precisely so as not to have to commit to a judgment of beauty (or of goodness).(...)It is a peculiarly inconclusive way of experiencing reality.(...)

Susan Sontag em An Argument About Beauty, ensaio do livro póstumo At the Same Time, Penguin, 2007.