Beholder

Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, so prepare your eyes to be bedazzled by the vision of artefacts currently on display at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Inspired by the ideas on aesthetics of Edinburgh University’s very own David Hume, Pat Fisher has expanded the customary boundaries of curation to involve both her curator counterparts and you, the audience.

Beholder is an exhibition as effective as Hume was in demonstrating the great inconsistencies and contrariety in conceptions of beauty. Curators and art directors from Edinburgh, Glasgow and beyond have each contributed one piece that embodies their own idea of beauty. Fisher somehow succeeds in creating a thread of consistency in works that range from a small piece of card with a hole in it by Yoko Ono, to the eye shadow-stained wood of this year’s Turner Prize nominee Karla Black and a wisp of 16th Century lace.

A little too much attention is called to the exhibition’s democratic ideals: the beholder’s role in completing the experience is emphasised from the exhibition title to the various educational events and talks on offer, generating a quasi social manifesto. But a context where the spectators are drawn in and the curators make the decisions is not so far removed from the established norms of display. Until, that is, an affable young artist approaches to me to tell me that I am beautiful and – suddenly - my beauty is beheld in his eyes – I assume the form of the artwork! And like Yoko, I leave the exhibition dancing rather than marching through life.