Beauty as an Excess of Intelligibility (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beauty and the beast: art and its passion for the beautiful, the ugly, and the sublime
South African Journal of Art History, 2007
In this article, I investigate the hypothesis that the notions of "the beautiful," "the ugly," and "the sublime" articulate the incompatible dimensions of what it means to live the kind of passionate life that most befits humankind. If Plato describes the ultimate object of our passion as a "beautiful cosmos," a closer look, via Lacanian psychoanalysis, reveals instead an irreducible complexity in its conception, precisely because this ultimate object remains a fundamental delusion. Since humans hope to restore not what they know to be the truly Real, but what they want it to be, one might quite legitimately propose that the truly Real is a state of chaos (the ugly), or paradox (the sublime). The link suggested here between the object of the passions and the notions of "the beautiful," "the ugly," and "the sublime" takes some explaining. For this purpose I have drawn upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. Taking account of the complexity of both the passion as an act and the passion's object, I have articulated a Lacanian account of human subjectivity as a complex configuration of passions, which can be applied as a heuristic for making sense of the diversity that goes under the name of "truth-telling" techné today. Thus, while driven by conflicting passions, many contemporary artists exemplify the notion that art is truth-telling techné, and in their various ways offer insight into what it means to live life as a work of art.
Beauty, ugliness, the sublime, and truth in art
South African Journal of Art History, 2007
Is it possible to articulate an aesthetic of the beautiful today, at a time when what Kundera's character, Sabina, describes as the 'uglification' of the world, has become pervasive, on the one hand, and when, on the other, social reality has become so complex that the harmonies required by the beautiful, conceived of as belonging within aesthetic space, can no longer be systematically justified in aesthetic terms? The answer given to this question here is negative, and goes hand in hand with the claim, put forward by Lyotard, that after Auschwitz one can no longer cling to the metanarrative of the universal emancipation of humankind. Similarly, it is argued, although beauty may still be experienced at an everyday, intuitive level, at a reflective, aesthetic-theoretical level it cannot be systematically sustained, given the complex, interrelated character of historical events, culture and social reality. It is further pointed out that Lyotard's claim, that the aesthetic of the modern as well as the postmodern amounts to an aesthetic of the sublime, albeit of different kinds, casts light on the reasons why, today, when one is surrounded by so much ugliness in the form of pseudo-beautiful kitsch, one cannot escape an aesthetic of the sublime, and several artists' work is alluded to, to substantiate this argument.
Art, Its Value, And How We See Ourselves
Daily Philosophy, 2023
This essay aims to identify the essential value of art. That is, all forms of art, art as such. And in doing so it is shown how that value is related to the deep features of the human condition. Art it is argued is more universal and fundamental than religion, science, or morality, for it connects to what it is to be human itself. Art better than they explores and reflects our place in the universe and how we thereby see ourselves, and the way in which we can through art seek to transcend our seeming insignificance in the universe and the banality of our mere existentiality.
The traditional conception of art is about sensual beauty and refined taste; modern art on the other hand has introduced an entirely unexpected dimension to the visual arts, namely that of 'revelatory narrative'. Classical art aspires to present works which can be appreciated as sensually beautiful; modern art, when it succeeds, presents us instead with the unsettling narrative. This radical difference in artistic purpose is something relatively new, and not yet fully appreciated or understood.
2018
Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigmenta dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment of perception. " Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of "the beginning, " the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured. The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Lévi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very