Art Criticism and the Professional Perspective: The Functions of Analogies between Music and Painting in Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression and William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (original) (raw)
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN ART AND MUSIC
Versopolis, 2017
There have always been parallels between visual art and music. Beethoven, loosely speaking, sounds like Rembrandt looks, Velazquez is like Mozart, Monet is the original impressionist painter, while Debussy is the original impressionist composer. What then are the parallels that go with, say, Warhol, Koons or Hirst? The paper answers these questions and points to controversies that might arise therefrom.
Rethinking Beauty in the "Musically Beautiful"
Hanslick im Kontext / Hanslick in Context, ed. Alexander Wilfing, Christoph Landerer, Meike Wilfing-Albrecht (Vienna: Hollitzer), 2020
Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful”) remains up to today the fundamental text of modern European musical aesthetics. It is read and debated as a theory of musical autonomy, an argument for the internal and objective grounds of aesthetic value and meaning in Western art music, as against competing notions of expression, the imitation or representation of emotion (affect, feeling) as the grounds of musical value and meaning. This essay starts from the question as to whether the role of “beauty” in Hanslick’s argument, even re-defined as a “specifically musical” kind (“the musically beautiful”), is merely a vestige of Enlightenment-era aesthetics, up through Kant. Even from the older Enlightenment perspective, the concept of beauty could be considered essential to Hanslick’s arguments, in the sense that he is explaining music’s right to be considered among the “fine” (“beautiful”) arts. Because Kant’s ideas of beauty in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) remain a touchstone for in the discourse of philosophical aesthetics, these ideas are reviewed, not as direct influences on Hanslick but as a point of reference for understanding Hanslick’s “musically beautiful” in the context of Enlightenment and idealist aesthetic thought. Surveying then the rhetorical, philosophical, and concretely musical valences of “musical beauty” in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, I argue that the lasting impact of Hanslick’s book likes in its ability to engage with the arguments of philosophical aesthetics, while also problematizing these (whether purposefully or not) through the practical insights of a musician and critic. Hanslick’s attempts to locate musical beauty in the quality of thematic ideas and their deployment in overall design of a musical composition opens up his arguments to contingencies of historical change, cultural context, and a complex of subjective factors. The remainder of the essay turns to the status of beauty as term of aesthetic judgement in Hanslick’s music criticism, especially in decade following the publication of the treatise. Modern musical beauty since the era of Viennese classicism is for Hanslick a continuing negotiation (I argue) between more-or-less stable values of pleasure in well-crafted melodic-harmonic designs, on one hand, and a shifting, inherently unstable admixture of Geist and Interesse, on the other: intellectual and technical challenges to the listener, in addition to pleasure in euphonious craftsmanship. Beethoven, above all the later music, becomes a paradigm of this problem, which Hanslick sees successfully negotiated in the music of Schumann and Mendelssohn (but not Wagner or Liszt), yet never to be solved definitively by any canon of classically “beautiful” music. The arguments of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen are already imbued to a significant extent with critical and historical understandings of musical beauty. Subsequent layers of historicizing commentary and examples that accrued over later editions of the text reinforce the factors of historical and subjective contingency that distinguished Hanslick’s arguments from more strictly philosophical conceptions of beauty in the first place.
Musicology Today, 2022
My study is an attempt to philosophically account for the competing influence in the 20th century musical understanding and practice of two radical and opposed aesthetics: the ideal of transgressive art (defined by Anthony Julius) associated with the avant-garde and the ideal of recovering the original and authentic art associated with extreme nationalism. My thesis is that these perspectives, under their extreme formulations, are, in fact, kindred sides of the broader philosophy of Modernity as developed since the Enlightenment. Also, as a consequence, by deconstructing the historical meaning and justification of these aesthetic forms of radicalism, one can reinterpret the artistic profiles of personalities such as Arnold Schönberg, thought of either as a revolutionary who totally rebelled against the musical past (as Theodor W. Adorno considered), or as not revolutionary enough (as Pierre Boulez thought). My historical methodology is based on using the two key-terms, “originality” and “transgression”, as regulative concepts within the constellation (a concept proposed by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics) of musical modernism. Thereby, I will show how these key-terms are connected to a network of other romantic concepts: organism, authenticity, aura (Walter Benjamin’s sense), integrity, folklore, and contemplation, in order to reveal how the structural and social meaning ascribed to this set of concepts greatly influenced the process of redefining musical thinking and musical reception. The main philosophies I will use as conceptual landmarks to clarify these interconnections are Martin Heidegger’s remarks about the work of art and Theodor Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian terminology and presuppositions. My overall conclusion will point towards the necessity of going beyond such radical modern oppositions with the aim of finding new types of theoretical principles and perspectives, more adequate as conceptual tools for dealing with contemporary artistic realities. LINK: musicologytoday.ro/49/MT49studiesStoicescu.pdf
Criticism after Romanticism: 2. Art for Art's Sake. 3. Impressionism and Subjectivism
A lecture on the history of critical ideas and aesthetics after the heyday of Romanticism, during the Victorian period. The movement of Art for Art's sake is here presented with its French origins and an overview of the main ideas on poetics and aesthetics of its main representatives in the Anglophone sphere: Edgar Allan Poe, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde. This is followed by an account of Impressionist criticism. Keywords: Criticism, Aesthetics, Art for Art's sake, Poetics, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde
My twofold aim with this essay is, firstly, to examine the ideas about art expressed in the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by the Victorian author Oscar Wilde. Secondly, I analyse how Oscar Wilde has implemented the philosophy of aestheticism throughout his novel. I achieve this by discussing the novel from the perspectives of the arts of painting, acting and literature. I examine the ideas expressed through the three main characters Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton. I give occurrences of alliteration, epigrams and theatrical traits of the novel as examples of how the novel in itself is a beautiful work of art. With this essay I wish to highlight the need for all types of art mentioned in The Picture of Dorian Gray