Alexandra Fol
This article was first published in "The Phonograph" newspaper, issue of April 2009
When the expanding cultural, socio-political and economic borders began to shake the familiar and thus convenient conventions of the 19th century world, writers such as Lev Tolstoy and John Ruskin, among others, attempted to address an emerging aesthetic problem – the very essence of artistic value in the present time.
In their own way, each author courageously attributes sweepingly general moral characterizations such as “good” and “bad” to art, based on whether the works of art follow each author’s socio-cultural agendas. Outdated models today, Tolstoy’s and Ruskin’s work represent the declining option of attributing moral classification to works of art in treatises without any attempt of reasoned logical substantiation. With the publication of Kant’s “Critique of Judgement” earlier in 1790, artists and historiographers began to gradually awake to an emerging artistic paradox – the gradual conscious separation and occasional deliberate antithesis of two important artistic ideas – beauty and perfection.
However, in the domain of fine arts before the mid 19th C., the terms beauty and perfection with respect to art were mostly equal in meaning and equated to nature and its laws. With the spread of Kantianism in the 19th C., the dawn of modernism at the turn of the 20th C. and the rise of an entire discipline dedicated to philosophy of Art, equating artistic value with a clearly defined objective, sociological or educational purpose became an impossible, sole escape route for thinkers attempting to address the question of ultimate artistic values – beauty and perfection.
A simple experiment highlights the issue: Can a composer create a beautiful piece of music and can a painter create a beautiful painting? Regardless of any personalized definition of beauty, everyone agrees that the answer is yes, it is possible that such a work can be created. Some may even add that beauty, whatever this word means, is the purpose of art.
However when the question is changed to “can a composer create the perfect piece of music?” the response is most likely to be no: perfection in art is impossible, because perfection is impossible to define. But is it not the case also with beauty?
The fundamental difference between beauty and perfection as applied to art is that beauty is an aesthetic idea, whereas perfection is an abstract idea. Their essences are not reconcilable, because an aesthetic idea is a subjective concept whereas an abstract idea, objective.
While the objectivity of an abstract idea, be it a concept, an action or a structure, makes it true and thus real, the ephemeral nature of beauty is separated from the objects of contemplation by the senses. Beauty, thus, is appearance. As explained by Locke’s theory of representative realism, the senses give us a representation of what is real. Additionally, Hegel makes a profound statement that in popular perception, the word ‘appearance’ always carries a pejorative connotation and ‘reality’ is appearance taken at face value. Art, however, is a double illusion, because it provides an illusion of the real world by being itself an illusion. Paving the way for many modernist art theories and theorists, Hegel situated art with philosophy and against the ideals of the romantics. Without immediately being obvious, Hegel formally established the split between aesthetic perception and intellectual purpose of art, a split that would dominate the ideas of the modernist artists in the later 19th and 20th centuries just as the rise of physical science rivalled the theological remnants of medieval doctrines that had survived the Renaissance up to the 17th and 18th centuries, known as the ages of early modern philosophy.
As Berkeley demonstrated at the height of early modern philosophy, in the first chapter of his “Treatise concerning the principles of Human knowledge” (1710), an abstract idea can only be conceived as imagined by an erudite person, whose intelligence and ability, developed after long study, can learn to deduce general notions. The fact that it took over two centuries, and a brilliant scholar, A. A. Luce, to reintroduce a vastly misunderstood Berkeley into mainstream philosophy, provides a very possible parallel of how long it took for the 19th C. French idea of “Art for Art’s sake” to take hold after the heyday of early modern art.
The humanistic and esoteric discourse of 19th C. European philosophy in general, and the philosophical nature of an abstract idea in particular, could not but clash with the notion of the ‘Romantic Musician,’ who took more than half a century to overcome the euphoria of his new-found liberty of expression before embarking on the Herculean task of overcoming the long-standing perception of artistic purpose as embodied by the etymology of Euterpes name.
This colossal undertaking - reconciling and uniting the classical ideas of beauty with the modern ideas of abstraction into a compelling work of art – appreciated as intelligent and perceived as beautiful – may be the last heroic struggle of the ultimate romantic genius.
And in Immanuel Kant’s words, a genius is the inborn disposition of the Human spirit through which Nature reveals the rules of Art.
So we, artists, shall succeed.
