In conversation with hube and Theaster Gates
In 1967, as the Vietnam War raged, singer-songwriter Phil Ochs penned the line, “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” It’s a quote that Dries Van Noten refers to often, an aesthetic and intellectual strategy that navigates turmoil and division to bring joy. Since stepping back from his eponymous label in 2024, Van Noten has been busy in “retirement,” founding the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, which is due to open in Venice later this year. Conceived as a space for dialogue between disciplines and generations, the foundation reflects his conviction that beauty can create new ways of thinking and connecting. For Theaster Gates, an artist with an expansive social-justice-based practice, beauty carries a similarly transformative potential. Like a carefully prepared meal, he says, art should nourish both body and spirit, it should “give you all the vitamins and nutrients that you need and give you pleasure.” For both artists, beauty seems philosophical: a way of finding and sharing light in increasingly dark and ugly times.
hube: In ancient philosophy, beauty was understood as being tied to physical appearance, virtue, and morality. Does beauty serve a purpose?
Dries Van Noten: For me, beauty is something that can help you, as a human being, to cope with the world. It can soothe you. When you’re nervous, looking at something that you think is beautiful can really help you move forward, clear your head, give order to your thoughts, or even raise unnecessary questions. It’s really very important. Every day, I need to have my dose of beauty, otherwise, I couldn’t survive.
Theaster Gates: I totally agree. There is this idea that beauty could serve some other purpose, that it moves towards something good, so that you’re not only faced with the possibility of an aesthetic intention. The beauty that I’m interested in moves from aesthetic to something invisible: the ability to move other people and to change the environment. Beauty in that sense becomes a kind of spiritual tool. It makes you want to change your life.
DVN: It’s quite nice what you said, because the title of the presentation, which we start with in the Fondazione, is a quote from Phil Ochs—a poet and singer from New York. In the seventies, he said, “In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.” When I saw that quote, I realised how important it was, especially given the times we are living in. It sums up a little of what we are saying now.
