Art Theory
BEAUTY CORRESPONDING TO THE AGE.
—If
our sculptors, painters, and musicians
wish to catch the significance of the age,
they should
represent beauty as bloated, gigantic, and nervous:
just as the Greeks,
under the influence of their morality of moderation,
saw and represented beauty in the Apollo di Belvedere.
We should, indeed, call him ugly!
But the pedantic “classicists” have deprived us
of all our honesty!
The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy, aphorism 161
Nietzsche was nothing if not a critic of developing industrial society. A philosopher of language by training he read classical Greek as well as Latin. It is likely he was adept at French, Hebrew and Sanskrit. He offers here that art articulates the spirit of an era. Art is the expression, whether in sculpted metal/stone, musical notation, or images on canvas — of a standard of beauty endorsed by the values, the sensibilities of an era. Nietzsche writes that the Greeks of antiquity accorded moderation as highly desirable. The “good life” according to an educated Athenian of the age of Pericles is the composition of habits which avoid excess, overmuch of pleasure, the principle of “the golden mean.” Moderation as ideal.
By contrast “beauty” according to the sensibilities of the late industrial age, and certainly that of the age of cybernetics is one of bloated, gigantic nervous excess.
It seems best to simply allow this proposition to be suspended for consideration. I will make no further comment.
What do you think? Really!
Feel free to comment…
3 thoughts on “Art Theory”
We humans see our immediate world both through the veil of current culture and our experiences of life, as was expressed in today’s offering. This blindness eschews fact and reality as we have witnessed in the recent debacle of an election. We have experienced this myopic behavior within our circle of acquaintances when those who refuse to open up to a WSYWYG world, instead buy into the fantasies offered by a blustering, blasphemous baboon. It seems most of our species would prefer magical thinking over reality any day of the week, and hence we hurl ourselves towards that cliff of self-inflicted extinction.
Are we able to take stock only when it is too late? I hold onto the fact that “too late” is an undetermined point. These lines came to me from today’s Daily Stoic:
Exactly!!!! Through social media and the internet we have unleashed a torrent of unfiltered and fear based nonsense that comes directly from the limbic portion of our brains. There is no thought process that accompanies these statements. The concepts expressed are emotion based and have little or nothing to do with rational reasoning.