What is artistic beauty? If we want to sum it up in one sentence, we can say that artistic beauty is the perfect unity of formal beauty and content beauty. Any artistic work has two elements: form and content. Form is external and content is internal. In the face of a work, we first come into contact with the external material form directly presented to the senses, and then understand the internal meaning guided by this material form. But as a result of artistic creation, every work is a combination of certain form and certain content. Some works, form and content are well combined and perfectly unified; The form and content of some works are not well combined and cannot be unified. The creation of art forms needs certain material materials, such as the line color of painting, the melody tone of music, the body movements of dance and the language of literature. However, the material itself is not an art form. Only by transforming materials according to the law of beauty, combining them into a whole and making them expressive can materials be transformed into art forms. Art forms are relatively independent, each art form provides a special pleasure, and different art forms produce different expressive force. The value of art lies in the perfect embodiment of the content of beauty in the form of beauty. "If a form is not a form with content, then it has no value." Form is divorced from content, and isolated formal beauty is not artistic beauty and has no artistic value. Only when the beauty of form fully expresses the beauty of content can there be artistic beauty.

Art is the reflection of social life, not the so-called "self-expression". Gorky attributed the content beauty of art to the embodiment of spiritual beauty, and the content beauty came from spiritual beauty. The spirit of art is to try to express the beautiful things that you are proud of with words, colors and sounds. Art is to embody the noble and beautiful things in the artist's mind in material form, that is, the beautiful mind. Art can describe not only beautiful things, but also ugly things. "Affirmation of good things and denial of ugly things are all manifestations of a beautiful mind. Only a beautiful mind can affirm beauty and deny ugliness. The relationship between reappearance factors and expression factors in artistic content has complicated changes in different works, which makes the issue of artistic beauty more complicated. Describing beautiful things does not mean that this work of art must be beautiful; Depicting ugly things, this work of art is not necessarily ugly.

Life is complicated. There are true, good and beautiful things here, and there are also false, ugly and evil things. Art can describe beautiful and ugly phenomena, but what is most worth describing is of course truth, goodness and beauty. Gorky believes that the most beautiful thing in the world is art, and the most beautiful and noble thing in art is the art of conceiving beautiful things.

It depends on how the artist describes it. The beauty and ugliness of an artist's mind are closely related. "Ugly things can think of beautiful things in themselves; Good things can also be thought in ugly ways. " It is an ugly art to describe beautiful things in an ugly way; Describing ugly things in a beautiful way is still the art of beauty. "The art of beauty is there to show its superiority. It beautifully describes natural things, whether they are beautiful or ugly. " The art of beauty can describe both beauty and ugliness. The contrast between beauty and ugliness is indeed an important principle to create beautiful art, but the purpose of the contrast between beauty and ugliness is ultimately to affirm beauty, and describing ugliness is only a means to create artistic beauty. Describing beauty is affirming beauty; To portray ugliness is to deny ugliness. The description of the contrast between beauty and ugliness must include the aesthetic evaluation and attitude of writers and artists in order to create beautiful art. The art of beauty can describe beauty as well as the opposition between beauty and ugliness.

The reflection of art on life is the reflection of aesthetics. If the description of ugliness only stays at the biological level and cannot be promoted to the aesthetic level, art cannot be beautiful. There are indeed some phenomena in life that are not easy to arouse people's aesthetic reflection, and art needs no description. If we describe it, it is easy to cause people's physiological reaction, inhibit aesthetic reflection, and thus destroy art.

However, if you conceive ugly things in a beautiful way, you can't create beautiful art. Kant said: "Fury, disease, war disasters, etc. can all be beautifully described as disasters, even in painting."

The fundamental question is whether the artist has a kind heart and what kind of aesthetic evaluation and attitude he holds towards the objects he depicts.

Art needs beauty. But artistic beauty is not only formal beauty, but the unity of formal beauty and content beauty. Artistic beauty is not only the theme, but the perfect unity of theme and theme.