Beauty, in a way, is tyranny. What's beautiful, what's not, who decides. It's a subject endlessly argued in art circles, as if we could ever all agree on what's beautiful--even if those formalist critics do rear up every so often to argue for objective standards of the visually pleasing.

My favorite definition of beauty comes from critic Dave Hickey, who has been taking it on the chin for beauty for years. His argument is devilishly simple: He's not talking about empty-headed prettiness, but rather for admitting that we are, for whatever reasons, attracted to things. In a 1995 interview Hickey said, "Beauty's... what makes secular art possible, since it creates conditions under which we might voluntarily look carefully at something.... Beauty is what we like, whether we should or not, what we respond to involuntarily."

And then there was a friend of mine who, leaning over a balcony at the Henry and looking down at the side-by-side installations by Polly Apfelbaum and Pae White, said, "They're so pretty," and his inflection happened to mean respect rather than scorn.

I love the idea that secular art is akin to the more forced religious variety, but different in agency--of being pulled toward something by what seems like a higher hand, as I was, walking around and around White's mobile. It's made of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bright silkscreened and irregular dots, collaged so that they resemble the eyes on peafowl feathers, and then strung regularly along fragile cords and hung together in a slight boomerang shape. This shape is supposed to be connected to the work's title, Grotto, in that the not very prominent indentation is meant somehow to draw you in, but I think it's more of a retro-textile shape that gives the work a kind of jazzy anthropomorphism you want to inspect rather than stay distant from. (We did not remain on the balcony for long.) A sign politely asks you not to touch or blow on the work, and you don't need to. The strings are so thin that your very presence sets them into motion that reaches all the way into the center of the loose object--a constant breathy floating, turning, slight action that is mesmerizing and lovely. Grotto is almost not an object, almost more of an action, a truly curious and beautiful thing.

I've seen a couple of Apfelbaum's installations, and frankly this one is not my favorite--I appreciated rather than loved it. In Los Angeles a few years ago, I saw one of her floor installations in bright Easter-colored petal shapes arranged in whorls in a small room, with just enough room to walk around the installation and admire the way the colors were thrown onto the walls. The work currently at the Henry, called Flying Hearts, is less insanely joyous, made up of hundreds, maybe thousands, of strips of crushed velvet on which the artist has applied dye from a squeeze bottle, in muted varieties of red and purple. Apfelbaum hand-cut the resulting strips of color, some of them long and thick as a wrist, some tiny as a fingernail. These are arranged on the floor along the edge of the gallery, densely in the middle and looser at the edges, with the strips like fingers pointing off into the distance. As with White's installation, you're drawn in--inevitably you squat down to take a closer look--but since the work is installed in a corner you can't walk around it. This may be a limitation imposed by the artist--you can do this, but you can't do this--but I can't see, in this case, what purpose it serves. The wonder of Flying Hearts has more to do with the language of multiples and effort--both present in White's Grotto--than with the sort of fascination above effort that Grotto achieves.

For me, beauty has a lot more than a little to do with what's interesting rather than good-looking--which is probably what tilts me toward White's installation rather than Apfelbaum's. I'm not easily swayed by uncomplicated pleasures. But does it matter? Hickey's definition of beauty undoes its tyranny: We can't be terrorized by beauty if we never apologize for our taste.