essay on art and aesthetics

Art and Aesthetics: Art in Public Space Essay

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Art refers to a means of purposefully putting things in a particular manner so as to influence the mind, senses as well as the emotions. It constitutes of various creations, human activities and several methods of expression of human ideas through paintings, music, sculpture, literature, filming and photography (Creative Intelligence 4).

Beauty on the other hand refers to the characteristics bestowed in an individual that leads to a perceived understanding of satisfaction and pleasure. It emanates from aesthetic. Ideal beauty thus refers to that which attracts admiration in a given culture leading to perfection. Thus art has been broadly explored in aesthetic so as to bring out its correlation to generations and mankind. This essay therefore, uses the concepts from semiotics to discuss art and aesthetics in relation to California Disney Hall as a piece of art in public.

Semiotic concepts include signs and making meaning out of the signs identified in a particular piece of art whether performing art, sculptural or modeling art. They mainly encampass creation of meaning out of a given sign accorded to artwork. The interpretation of a given piece of art work is based on the denoted meaning identified such as the identification of visible signs as well as the actual cultural relationship that comes along with such identifications.

Therefore, the main aim of semiotic artist is to derive methods of navigation coupled with interpretation of connoted meaning (Bann 128). This seeks to unfold the coded meaning and meaning unfolded in a given object of aesthetic value by determining its relationship to collective consciousness.

Concepts of semiotics have been identified in the history of art for instance, in the works of Panofsky and Riegl (Creative Intelligence 5) including the very important texts by Meyer bringing out visual semiotics. When these concepts are put together and modeled in to what is appealing to the senses of the public, it results in to what is called aesthetics. This is the creation of beauty. Art work that has been well organized in a given media so as to be staged out or performed in a public arena is referred to as public art.

Public art is important to public art specialists, bodies that commission art performances, curators as well as the entire art world with much emphasis being given to collaborations, the specificity of the site of performance and the involvement of the community. At times art is used to refer to any given piece of art that is displayed in a public arena or any public buildings that are easily accessible to the community (Maasik 50).

The California Disney hall is the best example of art in public. The hall is among the four concert halls of the LAMC (Los Angeles Music Centre). It has a seating capacity of two thousand two hundred and sixty five persons which is one of the characteristics of public art which puts focus on community involvement hence accommodating more people during performances (George). It serves various functions alongside being the centre for LAMC (Los Angeles Master Chorale and LAP (Los Angeles Philharmonic) performances.

The hall was built in honor of Los Angeles citizens and to Lilian Disney’s husband dedication to art. The acoustics and the architecture of this concert hall supersede that of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion making the most important piece of art. As opposed to many of the halls used for concert performances (Ronald and Melissa 55), California Disney hall’s entrance is ever open during daytime hence giving room for access by the public to its 7-level subterranean parking space, café, hotel box office as well as the gift shop.

The entrance of the hall constitutes of columns of enormous tree trunks made from Douglas fir with straight grains. Apart from providing support to the Hall structurally and visually the columns assist in lighting as well delivering air conditioning. Douglas fir is well appreciated for its aesthetic value, thus most of the surfaces in the hall have inco-operated it, in addition to the musical instruments made from timber.

This has enhanced the beauty and the aesthetic value of the hall that attract the public. Initially Frank Gehry had purposed to have the whole building finished with stone. However, he changed this to have the hall dressed with stainless steel. Frank settled on a stainless steel finish since he believed that this kind of finish worked well with the reflecting and changing the bright sunlight from southern part of California.

As a result of the halls numerous contours and exacting specifications in its design, structural beams made of steel had to be fixed using computer aided three-dimensional interactive application (CATIA).The steel beams were fixed into place only after having intersected the xyz coordinates as they appeared in the plan.

The public park of the hall sits on a one acre piece of land, thirty four feet over the hope street. It is strategically positioned thus making it accessible to all people without any restrictions through the hours of operation.

The park provides a good view point to most of the landmarks in Los Angeles for example the LACL (Los Angeles Central Library) which is on the southern part of Los Angeles, SGM (San Gabriel Mountains) and DS (Dodger Stadium) to the North as well as Hollywood sign which lies to the West. All these are visible particularly on a cloudless day.

The magnificent sight gives a sense of beauty to the public and every person looking at such a hall would appreciate the kind of time devoted to making the building beautiful and appealing to the viewers. The park also consists of full-grown flowering plants with a distinct ability to flourish in designed plant vases.

Many of the plants in the hall were taken from residential homes and lifted up by the help of three hundred and fifty ton crane. The flowers were cautiously positioned facing the initial direction before being uprooted to their new location (David Hume 58). During the entire period of Philharmonics the flowers keeps flowering consecutively offering the beauty of alternating shades of colors.

The hall also constitutes of LDMF (Lilian Disney Memorial Fountain). This was Franks design as he designed this in honor of Lilian Disney. This was in recognition of Lilian Disney’s affection for Roses and Delft porcelain. In creating this fountain, reinforced bars of iron were curved to create structures that resemble petals of flowers.

The mesh made of stainless steel was fixed and then packed with water proof concrete. Furthermore, several tiles and royal vases made of Delft porcelain were broken into pieces which were skillfully mounted by a team of eight people skilled in the art of ceramics. This led to the beautiful fountain present at the California Disney Hall.

The children’s Amphitheatre which is home to educational programs as well as programs owned by the community which are produced by MCED (Music Centre Education Division) as well as the LAP (Creative Intelligence 2). The seating area consists of concentric arcs made in small parts bearing in mind the children seating in this section.

This space provides relaxing place for visitors who would love to relax as well as have lunch or read anything as long as the children are not using it. Within the hall is the REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) which is the meeting point for audiences and performing artists, home to performing art, experimental theatre and music. Furthermore, there is a three thousand square foot display space including a café for multiple functions.

Art in public arena is in most cases developed to interact with the public by allowing the individuals to participate by their sight, feelings as well as their entire senses. For instance, in the Disney hall, the public can participate in such kind of art by sitting on the seats that are curved in a concentric manner thus allowing them to have a feeling of that particular art. The hall has a resonating interval of two minutes hence during the performance the public can listen to the piece of art being presented and appreciate it (George).

By looking at the tree columns and the floral plants one can feel the beauty of the hall as all these features are magnificent. The entire art work portrayed on the walls as well as the surfaces attracts the public thus making the people to feel the surfaces hence participating in the work through hands-on experience.

The Disney hall displays its art in public place by virtue of its sculptural work having to do with the culture of the people of Los Angeles. For example the broken Delft Vases used to decorate the hall are as a result of the affection that Lilian had in Porcelain.

Therefore the culture of using porcelain had to be brought out on this particular hall so as to in co-operate a particular artist culture in this piece of art. This gives a feeling of community involvement and ownership which one of the semiotics in art in public places which brings a sense beauty to a whole piece of artwork.

The Disney hall stand on a very large piece of land giving room for more people to be accommodated hence upholding the norms of art in public places. The kind of architecture employed on the building allows the public to enjoy the beauty of the exterior of the building without necessarily entering the building. It is important to note that anything that does not amuse the public is not art.

Never the less with Disney Concert hall, most of the people enjoy looking at the large columns supporting the building with lots of amusement. Memorials as well as monuments are some of the ancient forms of art in public despite the fact that architectural sculpture is a bit pronounced in bringing out a true picture of art in public. A case in point is the huge columns and the rose flowers in the hall. The large space occupied by the park is suitable for public viewing and this is what attracts the public viewing of the Hall.

Semiotic aesthetics demand that artwork is an indication of a sign whose aesthetic value is founded on a given mode of reference. This is true with the California Disney wall as much of its artwork is based on particular meanings. The porcelain used in decorating the fountain in the whole results from Lilian’s affection to artwork made from porcelain. In addition, to this, her affection for roses led to reinforced iron bars being made to resemble rose petals.

The fact that Walt Disney loved art led to his wife, Lilian designing the California Disney Hall in honor of her beloved husband. Last but not least the love for the culture of the public led to this hall being made such that it attracted and held more than two thousand people hence giving room for most people to have a glimpse of any piece of art being performed. Most of the performing artists take deliberate pleasure in staging their various works due to the acoustics of the hall.

Using the concepts of semiotics in designing the Disney hall is what makes it a piece of art in public. Several features put together to bring out the aesthetic value of the building remains as they are, they carry the meaning of what they are and not any other hidden meaning. For instance, the flowering trees that keep giving different shades of flower alternatively are actually flowers and they do not carry any other meaning.

Furthermore, the hotels, café and the shop at the hall just what they are and have no hidden meaning. With such kind of art being displayed with symbols and signs carrying their own meaning and not any other hidden meaning brings into the lime light the beauty of art in public on this hall.

It is also important to note that one of the important things about semiotic concepts is that meaning and signs are never limited. Therefore, to enhance the aesthetic value of any piece of artwork, this concept emphasis that a single sign can take various available meanings. It is therefore up to the audience to extract the exact meaning of a given piece of art without necessarily deviating from the exact meaning.

In conclusion, concepts of semiotics are based on the fact that objects are best appreciated from the perspective of the audience. This implies that the audience can view an object at any given perspective as long as he finds beauty any that given piece.

With various meanings contained in various signs which are employed by the artist, the audience can draw that which is pleasurable to him and accord that given sign. In addition, the meaning given to any piece of art in public can only be expounded once the social or original context of that work has been removed.

Never the less, semiotic concepts insists that irrespective of the meaning intended by original author of art work the meaning taken by the audience supersede the authors. Just like the California Disney hall, different groups of audience have expressed their different views concerning its aesthetic value. In view of all this whether the hall is appealing to the public or not is upon the audience to assert this with respect to how it views this building. However, till to date it remains to be the best art in public space.

Works Cited

Bann, Sawl. “Meaning/Interpretation.” Shift, Ronald Nelson and Richard. Critical Terms for Art History. Chicago, 2003. 128.

Creative Intelligence. “Architectural and Garden Highlights: Walt Disney Concert Hall.” Music Centre ,Performing Arts Centre of Los Angeles County. California: Music Centre, 2009.

David Hume . The letters of David Hume. Ed. John Young Thomson Greig. Vol. 2. Garland Publisher, 1983.

George, Lynell. The Los Angeles Times. 11 May 2008. Web.

Maasik, Sonia. Signs of Life in the U.S.A. Popular Spaces:Interpreting the Built Environment. Chicago: Oxford, 2006.

Ronald Lee Flemming and Melissa Tapper Goldman. Public Art for the Public (Art in Public Places Program) (Art in Architecture Program). The National Affairs, Inc, 2005.

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IvyPanda. (2018, October 12). Art and Aesthetics: Art in Public Space. https://ivypanda.com/essays/art-and-aesthetics-art-in-public-space/

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Bibliography

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• Introduction
• Three approaches to aesthetics
• The aesthetic object
• The aesthetic recipient

The aesthetic experience

Relationship between form and content.

• The role of imagination
• Emotion, response, and enjoyment
• Understanding art
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• The ontology of art
• The value of art
• Taste, criticism, and judgment
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• Kant, Schiller, and Hegel
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Such considerations point toward the aforementioned approach that begins with the aesthetic experience as the most likely to capture the full range of aesthetic phenomena without begging the important philosophical questions about their nature. Can we then single out a faculty, an attitude, a mode of judgment, or a form of experience that is distinctively aesthetic? And if so, can we attribute to it the significance that would make this philosophical enterprise both important in itself and relevant to the many questions posed by beauty, criticism , and art?

Taking their cue from Kant, many philosophers have defended the idea of an aesthetic attitude as one divorced from practical concerns, a kind of “distancing,” or standing back, as it were, from ordinary involvement. The classic statement of this position is Edward Bullough’s “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” an essay published in the British Journal of Psychology in 1912. While there is certainly something of interest to be said along those lines, it cannot be the whole story. Just what kind of distance is envisaged ? Are lovers distanced from their beloved? If not, by what right do they call their beloved beautiful? Does distance imply a lack of practical involvement? If such is the case, how can we ever take up an aesthetic attitude to those things that have a purpose for us—things such as a dress, building, or decoration? But if these are not aesthetic, have we not paid a rather high price for our definition of this word—the price of detaching it from the phenomena that it was designed to identify?

Kant’s own formulation was more satisfactory. He described recipients of aesthetic experience not as distanced but as disinterested, meaning that recipients do not treat the object of enjoyment either as a vehicle for curiosity or as a means to an end. They contemplate the object as it is in itself and “apart from all interest.” In a similar spirit, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that people could regard anything aesthetically so long as they regarded it in independence of their will—that is, irrespective of any use to which they might put it. Regarding it thus, people could come to see the idea that the object expressed, and in this knowledge consists aesthetic appreciation ( Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [1819; The World as Will and Idea ]).

Of a piece with such a view is the popular theory of art as a kind of “play” activity, in which creation and appreciation are divorced from the normal urgencies of existence and surrendered to leisure. “With the agreeable, the good, the perfect,” wrote Friedrich Schiller , “man is merely in earnest, but with beauty he plays” ( Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [1794–95; Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man ]).

Such thoughts have already been encountered. The problem is to give them philosophical precision. They have recurred in modern philosophy in a variety of forms—for example, in the theory that the aesthetic object is always considered for its own sake, or as a unique individual rather than a member of a class. Those particular formulations have caused some philosophers to treat aesthetic objects as though they were endowed with a peculiar metaphysical status. Alternatively, it is sometimes argued that the aesthetic experience has an intuitive character, as opposed to the conceptual character of scientific thought or the instrumental character of practical understanding.

The simplest way of summarizing this approach to aesthetics is in terms of two fundamental propositions:

1. The aesthetic object is an object of sensory experience and enjoyed as such: it is heard, seen, or (in the limiting case) imagined in sensory form.

2. The aesthetic object is at the same time contemplated : its appearance is a matter of intrinsic interest and studied not merely as an object of sensory pleasure but also as the repository of significance and value.

The first of these propositions explains the word aesthetic , which was initially used in this connection by the Leibnizian philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnullis ad Poema Pertinentibus (1735; Reflections on Poetry ). Baumgarten borrowed the Greek term for sensory perception ( aisthēsis ) in order to denote a realm of concrete knowledge (the realm, as he saw it, of poetry), in which a content is communicated in sensory form. The second proposition is, in essence, the foundation of taste. It describes the motive of our attempt to discriminate rationally between those objects that are worthy of contemplative attention and those that are not.

Almost all of the aesthetic theories of post-Kantian idealism depend upon those two propositions and try to explain the peculiarities of aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment in terms of the synthesis of the sensory and the intellectual that they imply—the synthesis summarized in Hegel’s theory of art as “the sensuous embodiment of the Idea.” Neither proposition is particularly clear. Throughout the discussions of Kant and his immediate following, the “sensory” is assimilated to the “concrete,” the “individual,” the “particular,” and the “determinate,” while the “intellectual” is assimilated to the “abstract,” the “universal,” the “general,” and the “indeterminate”—assimilations that would nowadays be regarded with extreme suspicion. Nevertheless, subsequent theories have repeatedly returned to the idea that aesthetic experience involves a special synthesis of intellectual and sensory components and that both its peculiarities and its value are to be derived from such a synthesis.

The idea at once gives rise to paradoxes . The most important was noticed by Kant, who called it the antinomy of taste. As an exercise of reason , he argued, aesthetic experience must inevitably tend toward a reasoned choice and therefore must formulate itself as a judgment. Aesthetic judgment, however, seems to be in conflict with itself. It cannot be at the same time aesthetic (an expression of sensory enjoyment) and also a judgment (claiming universal assent). Yet all rational beings, by virtue of their rationality, seem disposed to make these judgments. On the one hand, they feel pleasure in some object, and this pleasure is immediate—not based, according to Kant, in any conceptualization or in any inquiry into cause, purpose, or constitution. On the other hand, they express their pleasure in the form of a judgment, speaking “as if beauty were a quality of the object” and so representing their pleasure as objectively valid. But how can this be so? The pleasure is immediate, based in no reasoning or analysis. So what permits this demand for universal agreement?

However we approach the idea of beauty, we find this paradox emerging. Our ideas, feelings, and judgments are called aesthetic precisely because of their direct relation to sensory enjoyment. Hence, one cannot judge the beauty of an object that one has never encountered. Scientific judgments, like practical principles, can be received “secondhand.” I can, for example, take you as my authority for the truths of physics or for the utility of railways. But I cannot take you as my authority for the merits of Leonardo or Mozart if I have not seen or heard works by either artist. It would seem to follow from this that there can be no rules or principles of aesthetic judgment, since I must feel the pleasure immediately in the perception of the object and cannot be talked into it by any grounds of proof. It is always experience, and never conceptual thought, that gives the right to aesthetic judgment, so that anything that alters the experience of an object alters its aesthetic significance as well. As Kant put it, aesthetic judgment is “free from concepts,” and beauty itself is not a concept.

Such a conclusion, however, seems to be inconsistent with the fact that aesthetic judgment is a form of judgment. When I describe something as beautiful, I do not mean merely that it pleases me: I am speaking about it, not about myself, and, if challenged, I try to find reasons for my view. I do not explain my feeling but give grounds for it by pointing to features of its object. Any search for reasons has the “universalizing” character of rationality: I am in effect saying that others, insofar as they are rational, ought to feel exactly the same delight as I feel. Being disinterested, I have put aside my interests, and with them everything that makes my judgment relative to me. But, if that is so, then “the judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise there could be no room even for contention in the matter, or for the claim to the necessary agreement of others.”

In short, the expression aesthetic judgment seems to be a contradiction in terms, denying in the first term precisely that reference to rational considerations that it affirms in the second. This paradox, which we have expressed in Kant’s language, is not peculiar to the philosophy of Kant. On the contrary, it is encountered in one form or another by every philosopher or critic who takes aesthetic experience seriously and who therefore recognizes the tension between the sensory and the intellectual constraints upon it. On the one hand, aesthetic experience is rooted in the immediate sensory enjoyment of its object through an act of perception. On the other, it seems to reach beyond enjoyment toward a meaning that is addressed to our reasoning powers and that seeks judgment from them. Thus criticism, the reasoned justification of aesthetic judgment, is an inevitable upshot of aesthetic experience. Yet, critical reasons can never be merely intellectual; they always contain a reference to the way in which an object is perceived.

Two related paradoxes also emerge from the same basic conception of the aesthetic experience. The first was given extended consideration by Hegel , who argued, in his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (1832; “Lectures on Aesthetics”; Eng. trans. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art ), roughly as follows: Our sensuous appreciation of art concentrates upon the given “appearance”—the “ form .” It is this that holds our attention and that gives to the work of art its peculiar individuality. Because it addresses itself to our sensory appreciation, the work of art is essentially concrete, to be understood by an act of perception rather than by a process of discursive thought. At the same time, our understanding of the work of art is in part intellectual; we seek in it a conceptual content , which it presents to us in the form of an idea. One purpose of critical interpretation is to expound this idea in discursive form—to give the equivalent of the content of the work of art in another, nonsensuous idiom . But criticism can never succeed in this task, for by separating the content from the particular form, it abolishes its individuality. The content presented then ceases to be the exact content of that work of art. In losing its individuality, the content loses its aesthetic reality; it thus ceases to be a reason for attending to the particular work of art that first attracted our critical attention. It cannot be this that we saw in the original work and that explained its power over us. For this content, displayed in the discursive idiom of the critical intellect, is no more than a husk, a discarded relic of a meaning that eluded us in the act of seizing it. If the content is to be the true object of aesthetic interest, it must remain wedded to its individuality: it cannot be detached from its “sensuous embodiment” without being detached from itself. Content is, therefore, inseparable from form and form in turn inseparable from content. (It is the form that it is only by virtue of the content that it embodies.)

Hegel’s argument is the archetype of many, all aimed at showing that it is both necessary to distinguish form from content and also impossible to do so. This paradox may be resolved by rejecting either of its premises , but, as with Kant’s antinomy, neither premise seems dispensable. To suppose that content and form are inseparable is, in effect, to dismiss both ideas as illusory, since no two works of art can then share either a content or a form—the form being definitive of each work’s individuality. In this case, no one could ever justify an interest in a work of art by reference to its meaning. The intensity of aesthetic interest becomes a puzzling, and ultimately inexplicable, feature of our mental life. If, on the other hand, we insist that content and form are separable, we shall never be able to find, through a study of content, the reason for attending to the particular work of art that intrigues us. Every work of art stands proxy for its paraphrase. An impassable gap then opens between aesthetic experience and its ground, and the claim that aesthetic experience is intrinsically valuable is thrown in doubt.

A related paradox is sometimes referred to as the “ heresy of paraphrase,” the words being those of the American literary critic Cleanth Brooks ( The Well Wrought Urn , 1949). The heresy is that of assuming that the meaning of a work of art (particularly of poetry ) can be paraphrased. According to Brooks, who here followed an argument of Benedetto Croce , the meaning of a poem consists precisely in what is not translatable. Poetic meaning is bound up with the particular disposition of the words—their sound, rhythm, and arrangement—in short, with the “sensory embodiment” provided by the poem itself. To alter that embodiment is to produce either another poem (and therefore another meaning) or something that is not a work of art at all, and which therefore lacks completely the kind of meaning for which works of art are valued. Hence no poetry is translatable, and critics cannot do better than to point to the objective features of the poem that most seem to them to be worthy of attention. Yet that result too is paradoxical, for what do critics see in those objective features and how are their recommendations to be supported? Why should we attend to poetry at all if nothing can be said about its virtues save only “Look!”? Why look at a poem rather than an advertisement, a mirror, or a blade of grass? Everything becomes equally worthy of attention, since nothing can be said that will justify attention to anything.

Department of English

The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics

Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and learned range of references, Stewart's fresh and independent essays bridge the fields of literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art. Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art—long and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collections— The Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreaking ways to explore them. Whether she is following central traditions of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and printmaking or exploring the less well-known realms of portrait miniatures, collecting practices, doll-making, music boxes, and gardening, Stewart speaks to the creative process in general and to the relation between art and ethics. The Open Studio will be read eagerly by scholars of art, poetry, and visual theory; by historians interested in the links between contemporary and classic literature and art; and by teachers, students, and practitioners of the visual arts.

Click here for further information.

Georg Simmel

Essays on Art and Aesthetics

392 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2020

Art: Art Criticism , Art--General Studies , European Art

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Philosophy: Aesthetics

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“At long last a collection in English that does justice to the breadth, depth, and contemporary significance of Simmel’s writings on the arts! With many new translations and a wide-ranging introduction, Harrington’s volume portrays the influential modernist philosopher and pioneering cultural theorist in deep and critical engagement with a rapidly changing world. A powerful testament to Simmel’s conception of philosophical culture— and to the transdisciplinary significance of a thinker whose achievements continue to resist disciplinary categorization.”  

Elizabeth Goodstein, Emory University

“Georg Simmel is known in sociology for many things: the structure of social groups, the philosophy of money, metaphysical essays on life, individuality and social forms, the metropolis, and social differentiation. However, apart from the publication of Rembrandt in 2005, Simmel’s fascinating studies of culture, literature, and art forms have been neglected. Therefore, we owe Austin Harrington a serious debt of gratitude for editing and translating Simmel’s diverse publications on the theatre, sculpture, style and representation, and aesthetics into a single volume. In addition, I strongly recommend Harrington’s modestly entitled ‘Introduction’ as a comprehensive and meticulous commentary on Simmel and contemporary evaluations of his oeuvre. This volume will deepen and expand our understanding of the Simmel legacy for years to come.”

Bryan S. Turner, Australian Catholic University and the Graduate Centre CUNY

"The long and detailed introduction that Harrington provides is probably one of the best introductions to Simmel's works. . . Harrington's goal of providing the reader with a complete and well-structured collection of the most important Simmel essays on art and aesthetics in just one book is fully achieved."

Simmel Studies

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A different order of difficulty.

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé

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Contemplating Art: Essays in Aesthetics

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This book is a compendium of writings from the last ten years by one of the leading figures in aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson. It contains twenty-four essays and is divided into seven parts. The first is about issues relating to art in general, not specific to one art form. The second is about philosophical problems specific to music. The third part focuses on pictorial art, and the fourth on interpretation, in particular, the interpretation of literature. The remaining parts of the book discuss aesthetic properties, issues in historical aesthetics, humor, and intrinsic value.

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University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Art and Aesthetics After Adorno

Jay M. Bernstein, Claudia Brodsky, Anthony J. Cascardi, Thierry de Duve, Aleš Erjavec, Robert Kaufman, and Fred Rush, Art and Aesthetics After Adorno , University of California Press, 2010, 299pp., $18.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780982329429.

Reviewed by Gerald Bruns, University of Notre Dame

The title of this volume of papers recalls a famous essay by the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, "Art After Philosophy" (1969), in which Kosuth cheerfully turned Hegel on his head: "The twentieth century," he wrote, "brought in a time which could be called 'the end of philosophy and the beginning of art.'" [1] By this he meant that the modernist artwork is no longer answerable to any concept except the one peculiar to itself, as in the case of a Marcel Duchamp "Readymade" (a urinal, a snow shovel), which entails the assertion, "This is a definition of art." The definition is appropriately self-defeating. The modernist work is absolutely singular, outside the alternatives of universal and particular: an anomaly or heteroclite that alters (and is altered by) whatever context it invades. It is not an instance of any form or experience -- certainly not an aesthetic experience in any received sense of the word, perhaps not even an experience of an object . In 1968, for example, Lawrence Weiner "decided to have his work exist only as a proposal in his notebook … ; it didn't matter whether it was made or not" ( Conceptual Art , p. 173). About this same time the British conceptualists Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin "exhibited" works like "Air Show," which consisted simply of "'a column of air comprising a base of one square mile and of unspecified distance in the vertical dimension'" ( Conceptual Art , p. 174). [2] As Sol Lewitt said in "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1964), "Conceptual art is meant to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions" ( Conceptual Art , p. 15). Aesthetic experience is as much an experience of an artist's thinking as it is of a piece of work.

One of the motives of conceptual art, as of much of the art constructed while Adorno was composing his Aesthetic Theory , was to free the artwork, not just from its own history, but from the conventions of aesthetics and art criticism, with their inveterate allegiance to concepts of form and value -- "what irreducibly constitutes good art as such," in Clement Greenberg's words. [3] The artworlds of the 1960s may have been beneath Adorno's contempt (and not Adorno's only), but no one understood so well as he their terms of engagement:

The better an artwork is understood … , the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness [ konstitutiv Rätselhaftes ] becomes… . If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question, 'What is it?' [4]

Similarly, he was dismissive of the very idea of the artist as thinker, but he understood that what artists have to say about their work cannot be brushed off with a superior gesture ( Aesthetic Theory , pp. 334-35, and also pp. 24-25, on the importance of "isms"). Arguably the most useful volume of aesthetic theory that we have is Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas , which is composed largely of writings by artists themselves. [5]

Meanwhile, the volume at hand consists of essays by philosophers and critics who, by and large, have had enough of Adorno. The gist of Anthony Cascardi's essay, "Prolegomena to Any Future Aesthetics," is that, after Adorno, aesthetics needs to go back to Aristotle, or at least to Merleau-Ponty: "What is at issue is art's desire to serve as a form of sensuous cognition. This is something that aesthetic theory ought to be able to explain" (p. 16). Adorno's aesthetic theory certainly does not try to explain it. His conception of knowledge is dialectical rather than phenomenological:

Art's so-called intuitability [ Anschaulichkeit ] is an aporetic construction… . The word Anschaulichkeit , itself borrowed from the theory of discursive knowledge, where it stipulates a formed content, testifies to the rational element in art as much as it conceals that element by dividing off the phenomenal element and hypostatizing it ( Aesthetic Theory , pp. 96-97).

Unfortunately Cascardi doesn't engage Adorno on the question of art's cognitive dimension, with its indictment of "the violent act of rationality":

All aesthetic categories must be defined both in terms of their relation to the world and in terms of art's repudiation of that world. In both, art is knowledge, not only as a result of the mundane world and its categories, which is art's bond to what is normally called an object of knowledge, but perhaps even more importantly as a result of the implicit critique of the nature-dominating ratio ( Aesthetic Theory , pp. 138-39).

So when Cascardi affirms art as "a sensuously intelligent way of grasping the world" (p. 35), one can imagine Adorno replying that the very idea of "grasping," whether sensuous or otherwise, is just what the artwork calls into question by being itself refractory to any rule of identity. Recall the etymology of Begriff .

In "Adorno After Adorno," Fred Rush notes that "Adorno does discuss the sensuous aspects of art and considers them, at times, to be centrally involved in aesthetic experience proper. But sensuality [ sic ] is not a necessary condition of such experience, and it is usually not a sufficient one either" (p. 56). Rather, aesthetic experience is "formal experience" (p. 56), where form is no longer classical or even romantic (organic) in character but is decidedly modernist in its rejection of "rational construction" or the assembly of parts into a whole. Not that art can do without these things, but it is no longer defined by them. As Adorno says:

What is heterogeneous in artworks is immanent to them: It is that in them that opposes unity and yet it is needed by unity if it is to be more than a pyrrhic victory over the unresisting. That the spirit of artworks is not to be equated with their immanent nexus -- the arrangement of their sensuous elements -- is evident in that they in no way constitute that gapless unity, that type of form to which aesthetic reflection has falsely reduced them ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 89).

Aesthetics, as Rush suggests, must confront the fragmentary, which is the distinctive feature not only of the modernist artwork but of the entire field of art itself:

This is to say that criticism after Adorno will have to be multivalent. Art is not one thing. Not only are there several arts -- music, literature, painting, architecture, and dance -- each of which diverges greatly from others, there are also within the several arts a great degree of plurality (pp. 61-62).

Which is as much as to say that henceforth aesthetics must be historical as well as theoretical in its orientation. Adorno writes: "Art is historical exclusively by way of individual works that have taken shape in themselves, not by their external association, not even through the influence that they purportedly exert over each other. This is why art mocks verbal definition" ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 176). Indeed, the irony of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is that it negates itself dialectically by refusing to engage individual artworks at all: "the medium of theory is abstract, and this is not to be masked by the use of illustrative examples" ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 263). One could take Aesthetic Theory , with its poverty of examples, as a terminal case of aesthetics.

In "Framing the Sensuous: Objecthood and 'Objectivity' in Art After Adorno," Claudia Brodsky puts the crucial question squarely: "What is an art object in Adorno?" (p. 73) By way of an answer Brodsky emphasizes the temporality of the artwork:

That an art 'object' can be made of, can contain, 'moments,' and that such 'moments' rather than any specific content are what compose its 'objectivity,' like that of 'truth,' must render such an 'object' nonobjectifiable in the very manner Hegel rejected as nonaesthetic, that of an 'object' that is always changing, and thus not 'properly' an object at all (pp. 80-81).

Accordingly Brodsky devotes some excellent pages to Schoenberg's later fragmentary work as well as to the paratactic constructions of the artist Robert Rauschenberg:

Rauschenberg's art objects -- from the juxtaposition of the compositionally stunning Combines , to the unfinished ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong Piece , which, started in 1981 and projected, at 189 contiguous panels, to be the longest art object in the world, has been exhibited only at states of its development -- expands Adorno's definition considerably: all art in Rauschenberg is merely a fragment of possible art (p. 100).

In much this same spirit, Aleš Erjavec argues in his essay that the whole point of a Duchamp Readymade, or of the avant-garde more generally, is to provoke disagreements as to what counts as art by inventing "borderline cases" or limit-experiences:

Art's characteristics change incessantly, and much of the issue of art remains the question of whether a certain work is a work of art at all. It is because of this uncertainty that [as Adorno says] 'Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants' (p. 194).

Here one is reminded of Arthur Danto's essay, "The Artworld" (1964), with its thesis that in order to see Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as art, "one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting." [6] There is no engaging the artwork except at ground level, because what counts as art is local and contingent. Perhaps what we need, after Adorno, is a theory of nomad aesthetics, or a variable way of thinking about art that (like art itself) can pull up stakes as the ground shifts or the weather changes.

Just so, Jay M. Bernstein's contribution, "'The Demand for Ugliness': Picasso's Bodies," is as much art history as it is aesthetic theory. At Adorno's level, modernist art begins by defying "the prohibition of the ugly," that is, "the interdiction of whatever is not formed hic et nunc , of the incompletely formed, the raw. Dissonance is the technical term for the reception through art of what aesthetics as well as naïveté calls ugly" ( Aesthetic Theory , pp. 45-46). Bernstein locates this turn more precisely: "Arguably … modernist painting arrived at its exemplary realization in 1907 with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon " (p. 211). What makes this work a watershed is that the Demoiselles "appeared aggressive, fragmented, ugly" (p. 214). Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is sometimes cited as one of the first works of Cubism, but Bernstein distinguishes sharply between the "ugly, materialist Picasso" of the Demoiselles and "the beautiful, idealist Picasso" of angles and squares:

There are two irreducible transcendental schemas for the representation of space -- geometry and the human body; since the representation of space is a necessary condition for the representation of the world in general, then geometry and the human body are, in the setting of modern painting, competing transcendental frameworks for making perceptual experience of the world possible (p. 217).

The trouble with "transcendental frameworks," of course, is that they evaporate before they hit the ground. After all, it seems a short step, if not a straight line, from Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to The Girl with a Guitar (1910), which is no doubt more angular and abstract than the Demoiselles but is still formed by a human body, one in which the alternatives of beautiful and ugly seem outside the frame. Nevertheless, one can take Bernstein's point. Picasso in the Demoiselles "deploys what is best thought of as the painterly equivalent of parataxis in order to accomplish [a] systematic disordering … into a new conception of pictorial order" (p. 226) -- one that "ends the rule of subordination" (p. 228), or the resolution of disparate materials into a whole. Adorno associated Cubism with montage, whose "negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form" ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 155), but for Bernstein Cubism is a form of "rational construction" that Picasso put behind him, most famously in his Guernica (1937), with its distorted and dismembered bodies. Interestingly, the suffering creatures in Guernica are animals as well as humans. However, given the transcendental premium that Bernstein places on the human body, this might be a distinction without a difference. The resemblance of anything to a human body humanizes it, so that even Picasso's Nude Standing by the Sea -- "this monster … made out of geometric solids" (p. 242) -- is no longer geometrically beautiful but, like the rest of us, humanly ugly. Bernstein's position recalls Stanley Cavell's claim "that the answer to the question 'What is art?' [is] in part an answer which explains why it is we treat certain objects, or how we can treat certain objects, in ways normally reserved for treating persons." [7]

In which case the question of what counts as art is, as Adorno thought, irreducible to criteria, but for reasons different from Adorno's, which is roughly the point of Thierry de Duve's essay, "Resisting Adorno, Revamping Kant," where a judgment of taste as to whether something is beautiful is reformulated as a judgment as to whether something (a Duchamp Readymade, for example) can be called a work of art. De Duve basically reprises the argument of his book, Kant After Duchamp , where "the sentence 'This is art' is the paradigmatic formula of a modern aesthetic judgment in the truest Kantian sense" (p. 265). [8] Adorno and his dialectical nonsense are tossed aside -- "when all is said and done I must confess that Adorno doesn't do much for me; he rarely helps me think" (p. 261) -- in favor of a discussion of

Kant's unique discovery, indeed his unsurpassable contribution to aesthetics, [which] is to have understood that, by making positive judgments about beauty, human beings suppose their humanity to reside in their claimed common ability to have feelings in common. Call it universal empathy, if you want. The pleasure beauty yields [or, for all of that, the modernist pleasure offered by dissonant or ugly artworks] is not the egoistic pleasure of the senses, it must be the joy one has in sharing one's pleasure with anyone and everyone. Schiller's Ode to Joy , put to music by Beethoven in his ninth symphony, exactly transcribes Kant's exhilarating discovery of the sensus communis " (p. 270).

Stanley Cavell, reading Kant through Wittgenstein's eyes, made roughly this point in "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" (1965):

It is essential to making an aesthetic judgment that at some point we be prepared to say in its support: don't you see, don't you hear, don't you dig? Because if you do not see something , without explanation, then there is nothing further to discuss… . Reasons -- at definite points, for definite reasons, in different circumstances -- come to an end ( Must We Mean What We Say? , p. 93).

But then, as we have seen, disagreements as to what constitutes an artwork are not fruitless but, on the contrary, are one of the conditions of aesthetic experience. Certainly such disagreements are part of what occupies art history, if not aesthetic theory.

Perhaps one could go further and say that when an artwork stops being the occasion of disagreement, it ceases to be an artwork. As Adorno suggests, nothing is more deadly than immortality ( Aesthetic Theory , pp. 228-29). Even Duchamp knew that he needed to cut down on his Readymades: even two might be one too many, especially since the thing itself, as Brodsky would say, is more event than object. Indeed, Adorno sometimes makes perishability a requisite of artworks:

Although permanence cannot be excluded from the concept of their form, it is not their essence. Daringly exposed works that seem to be rushing toward their perdition have in general a better chance of survival than those that, subservient to the idol of security, hollow out their temporal nucleus and, inwardly vacuous, fall victim to time: the curse of neoclassicism ( Aesthetic Theory , 177).

Adorno then offers a rare mention of what he takes to be an exemplary case:

Stockhausen's concept of electronic works -- which, since they are not notated in the traditional sense but [are] immediately realized in their material, could be extinguished along with this material -- is a splendid one of an art that makes emphatic claim yet is prepared to throw itself away ( Aesthetic Theory, pp. 177-178).

Art and aesthetics after Adorno? One thing that remains open to inquiry, as Johanna Drucker has suggested, is "art's dialogue with technology," especially now when electronic media make possible digital artworks whose "sensuous materials" change shape as one moves through them, as in the works of Eduardo Kac, which seem admirably to capture the aesthetic fluidity that Brodsky has emphasized. [9] Drucker writes:

Adorno placed considerable weight on formal strategies of artistic production as a means [of resisting a culture of instrumental reason]. These can be identified by the terms determinate irreconcilability , dissonance , and nonidentity . Are these concepts sustainable within the context of the digital production of works of art? ( Speclab , p. 191)

Possibly, if art holds to its utopian task of "[making] things in ignorance of what they are." [10] Whether this task makes sense in the world of digital art is a question that would be worth pursuing, especially since digital art, as Drucker understands it, is a form of conceptual art, in which case one has to decide "whether the essence of the digital work is in fact its file, encoded and encrypted and clearly mathematical, or in a fulfilled, material expression of that file" ( Speclab , p. 194). Can an algorithm count as a work of art? Here the task of any future aesthetics might be not to put Adorno aside but to see where engagement with him in new contexts might lead.

No doubt he will lead, as usual, to disagreements. Adorno declared himself against "vacuous schemata of works [that] take the place of the works themselves" ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 296), and he sided with Pierre Boulez against "avant-garde artists who believe that annotated instructions for the employment of technical procedures already amount to an artwork" ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 342). Yet he famously conferred aesthetic autonomy on musical scores: they "are not only almost always better than the performances, they are more than simply instructions for them; they are indeed the thing itself" ( Aesthetic Theory , p. 100).

So here's a question for our once and future aesthetic theory: What's the difference between an algorithm and a musical score?

[1] Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology , ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 160.

[2] This year, incidentally, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), with its declaration that "sound, at last, has come into its own," meaning that "noises are as useful to new music as so-called musical tones, for the simple reason that they are sounds. This decision alters the view of history, so that one is no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky (the twelve tones or the twelve expressed as seven plus five), nor with consonance and dissonance, but rather with Edgard Varèse who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music" (pp. 68-69). The citation is from "The History of Experimental Music in the United States" (1959). Varèse (1883-1965) is sometimes called the "father of electronic music." OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music: 1948-1950 , a 3-cd collection published by The Electronic Music Foundation, contains Varèse's "Poem Électronique" (1958), as well as works by some forty other composers, including Cage's "Williams Mix."

[3] "After Abstract Expressionism," Art International , 6, no. 8 (1962), 26.

[4] Aesthetic Theory , trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 121.

[5] Ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992). Art in Theory runs to nearly 600 pages. See also Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings , ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), which assembles material roughly contemporary with the writing of Aesthetic Theory (and which runs to nearly a thousand pages).

[6] The Journal of Philosophy , 61, no. 19 (October 1964), 581.

[7] See Cavell, "Music Discomposed" (1967), Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 189; see also pp. 197-98.

[8] Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), esp. pp. 301-25.

[9] See Johanna Drucker, SPECLAB: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 191. See Eduardo Kac's website, http://www.ekac.org , and also his edition of Media Poetry: An International Anthology (Chicago: Intellect, 2007).

[10] "Vers une musique informelle" (1961), Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music , trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso Press, 1998), p. 322.

Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky 1853

The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality [1]

Written : 1853; Source : Russian Philosophy Volume II: The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture , Quadrangle Books 1965; Transcribed : Harrison Fluss, February 2008.

The sea is beautiful; looking at it, we never think of being dissatisfied with it, aesthetically. But not everyone lives near the sea; many people never in their lives get a chance to see it. Yet they would very much like to see it, and consequently seascapes please and interest them. Of course, it would be much better to see the sea itself rather than pictures of it; but when a good thing is not available, a man is satisfied with an inferior one. When the genuine article is not present, a substitute will do. Even the people who can admire the real sea cannot always do so when they want to, and so they call up memories of it. But man’s imagination is weak; it needs support and prompting. So to revive their memories of the sea, to see it more vividly in their imagination, they look at seascapes. This is the sole aim and object of very many (the majority of) works of art: to give those people who have not been able to enjoy beauty in reality the opportunity to acquaint themselves with it at least to some degree; to serve as a reminder, to prompt and revive memories of beauty in reality in the minds of those people who are acquainted with it by experience and love to recall it...

Thus, the first purpose of art is to reproduce nature and life, and this applies to all works of art without exception. Their relation to the corresponding aspects and phenomena of reality is the same as the relation of an engraving to the picture from which it was copied, or the relation of a portrait to the person it represents. An engraving is made of a picture not because the latter is bad, but because it is good. Similarly, reality is reproduced in art not in order to eliminate flaws, not because reality as such is not sufficiently beautiful, but precisely because it is beautiful. Artistically an engraving is not superior to the picture from which it is copied, but much inferior to it; similarly, works of art never attain the beauty and grandeur of reality. But the picture is unique; it can be admired only by those who go to the picture gallery which it adorns. The engraving, however, is sold in hundreds of copies all over the world; everyone can admire it whenever he pleases without leaving his room, without getting up from his couch, without throwing off his dressing gown. Similarly, a beautiful object in reality is not always accessible to everyone; reproductions of it (feeble, crude, pale, it is true, but reproductions all the same) in works of art make it always accessible to everybody. A portrait is made of a person we love and cherish not in order to eliminate the flaws in his features – what do we care about these flaws? we do not notice them, or if we do we like them – but in order to give us the opportunity to admire that face even when it is not actually in front of us. Such also is the aim and object of works of art; they do not correct reality, do not embellish it, but reproduce it, serve as a substitute for it...

While not claiming in the least that these words express something entirely new in the history of aesthetic ideas, we think nonetheless that the pseudo-classical “imitation of nature” theory that prevailed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demanded of art something different from the formal principle implied by the definition: “Art is the reproduction of reality.” In support of our statement that there is an essential difference between our view of art and that contained in the imitation of nature theory, we shall quote here a criticism of that theory taken from the best textbook on the now prevailing system of aesthetics. This criticism will, on the one hand, show the difference between the conceptions it refutes and our view, and, on the other, will reveal what is lacking in our initial definition of art as reproducing reality, and will thus enable us to proceed to a more exact development of concepts of art.

The definition of art as imitation of nature reveals only its formal object; according to this definition art should strive as far as possible to repeat what already exists in the external world. Such repetition must be regarded as superfluous, for nature and life already present us with what, according to this conception, art should present to us. What is more, the imitation of nature is a vain effort which falls far short of its object because in imitating nature, art, owing to its restricted means, gives us only deception instead of truth and only a lifeless mask instead of a really living being. [2]

Here we shall observe, first of all, that the words, “Art is the reproduction of reality,” as well as the sentence, “Art is the imitation of nature,” define only the formal principle of art; to define the content of art we must supplement the first conclusion we have drawn concerning its aim, and this we shall do subsequently. The other objection does not in the least apply to the view we have expounded; from the preceding exposition it is evident that the reproduction or “repetition” of the objects and phenomena of nature by art is by no means superfluous; on the contrary, it is necessary. Turning to the observation that repetition is a vain effort which falls far short of its object, it must be said that this argument is valid only when it is assumed that art wishes to compete with reality and not simply serve as a substitute for it. We, however, assert that art cannot stand comparison with living reality and completely lacks the vitality that reality possesses; we regard this as beyond doubt...

Let us see whether further objections to the imitation theory apply to our view:

Since it is impossible to achieve complete success in imitating nature, all that remains is to take smug pleasure in the relative success of this hocus-pocus; but the more the copy bears an external resemblance to the original, the colder this pleasure becomes, and it even grows into satiety or revulsion. There are portraits which, as the saying goes, are awfully like the originals. An excellent imitation of the song of the nightingale begins to bore and disgust us as soon as we learn that it is not a real nightingale singing, but some skillful imitator of the nightingale’s trilling; this is because we have a right to expect different music from a human being. Such tricks in the extremely skillful imitation of nature may be compared with the art of the conjurer who without a miss threw lentils through an aperture no bigger than a lentil, and whom Alexander the Great rewarded with a medimnos of lentils. [3]

These observations are perfectly just, but they apply to the useless and senseless copying of what does not deserve attention, or to the depiction of mere externals devoid of content. (How many vaunted works of art earn this biting, but deserved, ridicule!) Content worthy of the attention of a thinking person is alone able to shield art from the reproach that it is merely a pastime, which it all too often is. Artistic form does not save a work of art from contempt or from a pitying smile if, by the importance of its idea, the work cannot answer the question: Was it worth the trouble? A useless thing has no right to respect. “Man is an end in himself”; but the things man makes must have their end in the satisfaction of man’s needs and not in themselves. That is precisely why the more perfectly a useless imitation bears external resemblance to the original, the more disgust it arouses. “Why were so much time and labor wasted on it?” we ask ourselves when looking at it. “And what a pity that such lack of content can go hand in hand with such perfection of workmanship!” The boredom and disgust aroused by the conjurer who imitates the song of the nightingale are explained by the very remarks contained in the above criticism: a man who fails to understand that he ought to sing human songs and not make the trills that have meaning only in the song of the nightingale is deserving only of pity.

As regards portraits which are awfully like the originals, this must be understood as follows: to be faithful, every copy must convey the essential features of its original. A portrait that fails to convey the chief, the most expressive, features of a face is not a faithful portrait; and when, at the same time, the petty details of the face are distinctly shown, the portrait is rendered ugly, senseless, lifeless – how can it be anything but awful? Objection is often raised to what is called the “photographic copying” of reality; would it not be better to say that copying, like everything man does, calls for understanding, for the ability to distinguish essential from inessential features? “Lifeless copying” – such is the usual phrase; but a man cannot make a faithful copy if the lifeless mechanism is not guided by living meaning. It is not even possible to make a faithful facsimile of an ordinary manuscript if the meaning of the letters that are being copied is not understood...

We must now supplement the definition of art presented above, and from the examination of the formal principle of art proceed to the definition of its content.

Usually it is said that the content of art is the beautiful; but this restricts the sphere of art too much. Even if we grant that the sublime and the comic are moments of. the beautiful, the content of many works of art will not come under the three headings of the beautiful, the sublime, and the comic. In painting, these subdivisions do not apply to pictures of domestic life in which there is not a single beautiful or ridiculous person, to pictures of old men or old women not distinguished for exceptional beauty of age, and so forth. In music it is still more difficult to introduce the usual subdivisions; if we put marches, pathetic pieces, and so forth, under the heading of the sublime, if we put pieces that breathe the spirit of love or gaiety under the heading of the beautiful, and if we find numerous comic songs, there still remain an enormous number of works the content of which cannot be put under any of these headings without stretching a point. Under what heading are we to put sad melodies – under the sublime, as suffering, or under the beautiful, as tender dreams?

But of all the arts, the one that is most difficult to squeeze into the tight compartments of beauty and its moments, with respect to content, is poetry. Its sphere is the whole realm of life and nature. The poet’s views on life in all its manifestations are as diverse as the thinker’s conceptions of these diverse phenomena; and the thinker finds in reality much more than the beautiful, the sublime, and the comic. Not all grief reaches the point of tragedy; not all joy is graceful or comical. That the content of poetry is not exhausted by the well-known three elements can easily be seen from the fact that poetical works no longer fit into the frame of the old subdivisions. That dramatic poetry depicts not only the tragic or the comic is proved by the fact that besides comedies and tragedies the drama also had to appear. The epic, which belongs chiefly to the sublime, has been replaced by the novel, with its innumerable categories. For most lyrical poems today it is impossible to find among the old subdivisions any heading that would indicate the character of their content; hundreds of headings would not suffice, so three are certainly not enough to embrace them all (we are speaking of the character of the content and not of the form, which must always be beautiful).

The simplest way to solve this riddle would be to say that the sphere of art is not limited only to beauty and its so-called moments, but embraces everything in reality ( m nature and in life) that is of interest to man not as a scholar but as an ordinary human being; that which is of common interest in life – such is the content of art. The beautiful, the tragic, and the comic are only the three most determinate of the thousands of elements upon which vital interests depend, and to enumerate them all would mean enumerating all the feelings and aspirations that stir man’s heart.

It is scarcely necessary to adduce more detailed proof of the correctness of our conception of the content of art, since although another, narrower definition of content is usually offered in aesthetics, our view predominates in actual fact, i.e., among artists and poets themselves. It constantly finds expression in literature and in life. If it is thought necessary to define the beautiful as the main or, to be more exact, the sole essential content of art, the real reason for this is that the distinction between beauty as the object of art and beauty of form, which is indeed an essential quality of every work of art, is only vaguely seen. But this formal beauty, or unity of idea and image, of content and form, is not the special feature that distinguishes art from all other branches of human activity. In acting, a man always has an aim, which constitutes the essence of his action. The worth of the act itself is judged by the degree to which it conforms to the aim we wished to realize by it. All man’s works are judged by the degree of perfection attained in their execution. This is a general law for handicraft, for industry, for scientific activity, etc. It also applies to works of art: the artist (consciously or unconsciously, it makes no difference) tries to reproduce for us a certain aspect of life; it goes without saying that the merits of his work will depend upon how he has done his job. “A work of art strives for the harmony of idea and image” no more and no less than does the shoemaker’s craft, the jeweler’s craft, calligraphy, engineering, moral resolve. “All work should be done well” – such is the meaning of the phrase “harmony between idea and image."...

We have already observed that the important word in this phrase is “image"- it tells us that art expresses an idea not through abstract concepts, but through a living, individual fact. When we say that art is the reproduction of nature and life, we are saying the same thing: in nature and in life there are no abstract beings; everything in them is concrete. A reproduction must as far as possible preserve the essence of the thing reproduced; therefore, a work of art must contain as little of the abstract as possible; everything in it must be, as far as possible, expressed concretely in living scenes and in individual images...

Confusion of beauty of form as an essential quality of a work of art, and beauty as one of the numerous objects of art, has been one of the causes of the sad abuses in art. “The object of art is beauty,” beauty at all costs, art has no other content. What is the most beautiful thing [ prekrasnoye ] in the world? In human life – beauty [ krasota ] and love; in nature – it is difficult to decide – there is so much beauty in it. Thus it is necessary, appropriately and inappropriately, to fill poetical works with descriptions of nature: the more there is of this, the more beauty – there is in our work...

Inappropriate dilation on the beauty of nature is not so harmful in a work of art; it can be skipped, for it is tacked on in an external way; but what is to be done with a love plot? It cannot be ignored, for it is the base to which everything else is tied with Gordian knots; without it everything loses coherence and meaning. Apart from the fact that a loving couple, suffering or triumphant, makes thousands of works frightfully monotonous, apart from the fact that the vicissitudes of their love and the author’s descriptions of beauty leave no room for essential details, this habit of depicting love, love, eternally love makes poets forget that life has other aspects much more interesting for man in general. All poetry, and all life depicted in it, assumes a sort of sentimental, rosy hue; instead of seriously depicting human life a great many works of art represent an excessively youthful (to refrain from using more exact epithets) view of life, and the poet usually appears to be a very young lad whose stories are interesting only for people of the same moral or physiological age as himself. Lastly, this degrades art in the eyes of people who have emerged from the blissful period of early youth. Art seems to be a pastime too sickly sentimental for adults and not without its dangers for young people. We certainly do not think that the poet ought to be prohibited from describing love; but aesthetics must demand that he describe love only when he really wants to do so...

Love, appropriately or inappropriately – this is the first harm inflicted on art by the idea that the content of art is beauty. The second, closely connected with the first, is artificiality. In our times people laugh at Racine and Madame Deshoulieres, but it is doubtful whether modern art has left them far behind as regards simplicity, naturalness of the springs of action, and genuine naturalness of dialogue. The division of dramatis personae into heroes and villains may to this day be applied to works of art in the pathetic category. How coherently, smoothly, and eloquently these people speak! Monologues and dialogues in modern novels are not much less stilted than the monologues in classical tragedies. “Everything in works of art must be clothed in beauty,” and one of the conditions of beauty is that all the details must develop out of the plot: so the characters in novels and plays are given such profoundly thought-out plans of action as persons in real life scarcely ever draw up. And if one of the characters takes an instinctive, thoughtless step, the author deems it necessary to justify it on the grounds of the essence of the character’s personality, and the critics are displeased with the fact that “the action is unmotivated” – as if an action is always motivated by individual character and not by circumstances and by general traits of the human heart...Let us, however, return to the question of the essential purpose of art.

The first and general purpose of all works of art, we have said, is to reproduce phenomena of real life that are of interest to man. By real life we mean, of course, not only man’s relation to the objects and beings of the objective world, but also his inner life. Sometimes a man lives in a dream – in that case the dream has for him (to a certain degree and for a certain time) the significance of something objective. Still more often a man lives in the world of his emotions. These states, if they become interesting, are also reproduced by art. We mention this in order to show that our definition also takes in the imaginative content of art.

But we have said above that art has another purpose besides reproduction, namely, to explain life. This can be done to some degree by all the arts: often it is sufficient to call attention to an object (which art always does) in order to explain its significance, or to enable people to understand life better. In this sense, art differs in no way from a discourse about an object; the only difference here is that art achieves its purpose much better than a discourse, particularly a learned discourse; it is much easier for us to acquaint ourselves with an object, we begin to take an interest in it much more quickly when it is presented to us in living form than when we get a dry reference to it. Fenimore Cooper’s novels have done more to acquaint society with the life of savages than ethnographic narratives and arguments on the importance of studying this subject.

But while all the arts can point to new and interesting objects, poetry always of necessity points sharply and clearly to the essential features of an object. Painting reproduces an object in all its details; so does sculpture. But poetry cannot take in an excessive amount of detail; of necessity leaving a great deal out of the picture, it focuses our attention on the features retained. This is viewed as an advantage that poetic scenes have over reality; but every single word does the same to the object it denotes. In the word (concept), too, everything incidental is left out and only the essential features of the object are retained. For the inexperienced mind the word denoting the object may be clearer than the object itself, but this clarity is only an impoverishment...An object or event may be more intelligible in a poetical work than in reality, but the only merit we recognize in that is the clear and vivid allusion to reality; we do not attach independent significance to it as something that could compete with the fullness of real life. We cannot refrain from adding that every prose narrative does the same thing poetry does. The concentration of attention upon the essential features of an object is not the distinguishing feature of poetry, but the common feature of all rational speech.

The essential purpose of art is to reproduce what is of interest to man in real life. But, being interested in the phenomena of life, man cannot but pronounce judgment on them, consciously or unconsciously. The poet or artist cannot cease to be a man and thus he cannot, even if he wants to, refrain from pronouncing judgment on the phenomena he depicts. This judgment is expressed in his work – this is another purpose of art, which places it among the moral activities of man.

There are men whose judgment on the phenomena of life consists almost exclusively in that they betray an inclination for some aspects of reality and avoid others: these are men whose mental activity is weak. The work of such a man – poet or artist – has no other purpose than that of reproducing his favorite side of life. But if a man whose mental activity is powerfully stimulated by questions engendered by observing life is gifted with artistic talent, he will, in his works, consciously or unconsciously strive to pronounce a living judgment on the phenomena that interest him (and interest his contemporaries, for a thinking man cannot think about insignificant problems that interest nobody but himself). His painting or his novels, poems, and plays will present or solve problems that arise out of life for the thinking man; his works will be, as it were, essays on subjects presented by life. This trend may find expression in all the arts (in painting, for example, we can point to pictures of social life and historical scenes), but it is developing chiefly in poetry, which provides the fullest opportunity to express a definite idea. In such a case the artist becomes a thinker, and works of art, while remaining in the sphere of art, acquire scientific significance. It goes without saying that in this respect there is nothing corresponding to the work of art in reality – but this applies only to its form. As regards content, as regards the problems presented or solved by art, they are all to be found in real life, only without premeditation, without arrière-pensée.

Let us suppose that a work of art develops the idea that straying temporarily from the true path will not doom a strong nature, or that one extreme leads to another; or that it depicts a man in conflict with himself; or depicts, if you will, the conflict between passions and lofty aspirations (we are pointing to different fundamental ideas we have discerned in Faust )- does not real life provide cases where the same situations develop? Is not high wisdom obtained from the observation of life? Is not science simply an abstraction from life, the placing of life within a formula? Everything science and art express is to be found in life, and found in its fullest and most perfect form, with all its living details – the details which usually contain the true meaning of the matter, and which are often not understood by science and art, and still more often cannot be embraced by them. In the events of real life everything is true, nothing is overlooked, there is not that one-sided, narrow view from which all the works of man suffer. As instruction, as learning, life is fuller, truer, and even more artistic than all the works of scholars and poets. But life does not think of explaining its phenomena to us; it is not concerned with deducing axioms. This is done in works of science and art. True, the deductions are incomplete, the ideas are one-sided compared with what life presents; but they have been made for us by geniuses; without their aid our deductions would be still more one-sided and meager.

Science and art (poetry) are manuals for those beginning the study of life; their purpose is to prepare the student to read the original sources, and later to serve as reference books from time to time. It never occurs to science to conceal this; nor does it occur to poets to conceal it in their offhand remarks about the point of their works. Aesthetics alone persists in asserting that art is superior to life and reality.

Connecting everything that has been said, we get the following view of art: the essential purpose of art is to reproduce everything in life that is of interest to man. Very often, especially in poetical works, the explanation of life, judgment of its phenomena, also comes to the fore.

The relation of art to life is the same as that of history; the only difference in content is that history, in its account of the life of mankind, is concerned mainly with factual truth, whereas art gives us stories about the lives of men in which the place of factual truth is taken by faithfulness to psychological and moral truth. The first function of history is to reproduce life; the second, which is not performed by all historians, is to explain it. By failing to perform the second function the historian remains a mere chronicler and his work serves merely as material for the true historian, or as reading matter to satisfy curiosity. By performing this second function the historian becomes a thinker, and as a consequence his work acquires scientific merit. Exactly the same must be said about art. History does not set out to compete with real historical life; it admits that the pictures it paints are pale, incomplete, more or less incorrect, or at all events one-sided. Aesthetics must admit that art, too, and for the same reasons, must not even think of comparing itself with reality, much less of surpassing it in beauty...

Defense of reality as against fantasy, the attempt to prove that works of art cannot possibly stand comparison with living reality – such is the essence of this essay. But does not what the author says degrade art? Yes, if showing that art stands lower than real life in the artistic perfection of its works means degrading art. But protesting against panegyrics does not mean disparagement. Science does not claim to stand higher than reality, but that gives it nothing to be ashamed of. Art, too, must not claim to stand higher than reality; that would not degrade it. Science is not ashamed to say that its aim is to understand and explain reality, and then to use its explanation for man’s benefit. Let not art be ashamed to admit that its aim is to compensate man, in case he lacks the opportunity to enjoy the full aesthetic pleasure afforded by reality, by reproducing this precious reality as far as possible, and by explaining it for his benefit.

Let art be content with its fine and lofty mission of being a substitute for reality in the event of its absence, and of being a manual of life for man.

Reality stands higher than dreams, and essential purpose stands higher than fantastic claims.

1. Reprinted, with extensive revisions and corrections for this volume by James P. Scanlan, from Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, Selected Philosophical Essays, Moscow, 1953, pp. 364-377, 379. The revisions and corrections were made by reference to the Russian text in Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky, Esteticheskiye otnosheniya iskusstva k deystvitelnosti, Moscow, 1955, pp. 108-125, 128-129.

2. Loosely quoted by Chernyshevsky from Part III of Hegel’s Introduction to his Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik (pages 54-55 in the Berlin, 1842, edition). – trans.

3. Another loose quotation from the same work (pp. 56-57).- trans.

Chernyshevsky Archive

An Essay in Aesthetics

by Elyse Graham

An early but significant article by Roger Fry , an art critic in the Bloomsbury Group, “An Essay in Aesthetics” (April 1909 ) attempts to describe what art is and why it matters. 1 Because Fry lived in a spirit of openness to new ideas (with attendant intellectual restlessness), it would be unfair to characterize the essay as a statement of doctrine, at least more than a provisional and temporary one. But it gives a glimpse of some of the particles of his thought, and it exerted strong influence on Clive Bell when he was writing his own statement of doctrine, Art .

Fry starts with psychology. Much of life runs on instinct: when we see a bull, we fly or fight.  But as humans we can take those sensations, the experiences and landscapes we pass through, and make them dimensions of ourselves. That’s why when we turn inward, we find another world there. The job of the artist is to elaborate and interpret that world, the imagination.

Because imaginative visions, however realistic, don’t demand action as reality does, we can look at them more carefully, notice the sensations they arouse, take the time to feel and taste those sensations. To handle the real world, the brain sweeps away a lot of information before it hits the radar; for instance, if a bull is running at you, you won’t notice whether all four hooves ever touch the ground at once. But you might notice while watching a bull on film. And if detachment weakens emotion, it compensates with clarity—horror may burn lower if you witness a murder onscreen than if you were in an alley, but the screen lets you give those feelings your full attention. In fact, because screens and frames prevent viewers from taking action, there is no moral responsibility in art. Art is amoral (18-20).

Religion also belongs to the imaginative life, according to Fry, since religion deals with affairs not of the solid world; and religion is moral insofar as it guides conduct. But religion must have more to speak for its value since, speaking historically, people acting from religious conviction haven’t always been fonts of good. Since the value of religion isn’t in question, it must be that the exercise of “certain spiritual capacities of human nature,” as Fry puts it, “is in itself good and desirable apart from their effect upon actual life” (21-22). On the same grounds, art is good for its own sake. If we run in daily life on a healthy fuel of envy and ambition, art reacquaints us with less useful but more important emotions (including what Fry calls “the cosmic emotion”) (27). Art exercises the soul.

From this, the features of a work of art: it must supply a frame to detach the viewer, and should have rich enough material to reward heightened perception. It should include order, so as not to bewilder the senses, as well as variety, for stimulation. Beauty is expendable as long as the artwork creates a certain fullness of experience. Finally, we need what makes it all pop: “the consciousness of purpose, a peculiar relation of sympathy with the man who made this thing” (30).

1 Fry, Roger. “An Essay in Aesthetics.” New Quarterly , 2 (April 1909), 171-90. Reprinted in Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928), pp. 16-38. Hereafter cited by page number only.

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Art and Answerability

Early philosophical essays.

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The Position and Significance of Thomas Aquinas’s Aesthetic Thoughts in the History of Aesthetics

• First Online: 31 August 2024

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• Zhiqing Zhang 2  

This book primarily focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica  as the main source material and foundation to showcase his aesthetic and artistic thoughts, while also referencing his other works and existing research findings to thoroughly compile and analyze the main content and characteristics of Aquinas’s aesthetic thought. By situating Aquinas’s aesthetics within the broader framework of medieval aesthetic thought and the history of aesthetic development, the book demonstrates how Aquinas inherited and transformed ancient philosophy and aesthetic ideas, especially those of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. It further shows how he accepted, developed, and perfected medieval aesthetic thought, establishing him as a major consolidator of medieval aesthetic ideas. Through the examination of the relationship between Aquinas’s aesthetic thought and both modern and twentieth-century aesthetics, the book reveals the enduring vitality of Aquinas’s aesthetic and artistic philosophies.

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Gilbert & Kuhn. A History of Aesthetics , Volume I, translated by Xia Qianfeng. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1989 edition, p. 298.

Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetics , translated by Zhang Jin. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1985 edition, p. 266.

Gilbert & Kuhn, A History of Aesthetics , Volume I, translated by Xia Qianfeng. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1989 edition, pp. 299-300.

Kant, Critique of Judgment , Volume I, translated by Zong Baihua. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1964 edition, p. 46.

Kant, Critique of Judgment , Volume I, translated by Zong Baihua. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1964 edition, p. 41.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (2nd Edition). Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2004 edition, pp. 10–11.

Kant, Critique of Judgmen t, Volume II, translated by Wei Zhuomin. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1964 edition, p. 89.

Kant, Critique of Judgment , Volume I, translated by Zong Baihua. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1964 edition, p. 39.

Kant, Critique of Judgment , Volume I, translated by Zong Baihua. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1964 edition, pp. 41, 46.

Kant, Critique of Judgment, Volume I, translated by Zong Baihua. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1964 edition, pp. 76, 152-154.

Hegel, Aesthetics , Volume I, translated by Zhu Guangqian. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1979 edition, p. 142.

Hegel, Aesthetics , Volume I, translated by Zhu Guangqian. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1979 edition, p. 160.

Hegel, Aesthetics, Volume I, translated by Zhu Guangqian. Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1979 edition, pp. 135-137.

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry , Translated by Joseph W. Evans, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962, p. 34.

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry , translated by Liu Youyuan et al. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, pp. 15, 51, 61, 141.

Thomas Aquinas delineated two distinct approaches to evaluating moral virtues, such as fortitude: one is the conceptual rational mode, through which moral philosophers, though not virtuous themselves, can discern what constitutes goodness and fortitude; the other is the embodiment of goodness in individuals, the unity of goodness with our being—where a person may have no understanding of moral philosophy yet embody the virtues of goodness and fortitude. See Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry , translated by Liu Youyuan et al. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, pp. 95-96.

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry , translated by Liu Youyuan et al. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, pp. 140-144, 159.

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry , Translated by Joseph W. Evans, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962, p. 32.

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry , Translated by Joseph W. Evans, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962, p. 33-34.

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry , translated by Liu Youyuan et al. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, p. 165.

Maritain posits that the beauty of poetry is a creation borne of the spirit's freedom. “Poetry lacks a goal, a specified objective. Yet, it possesses a transcendent purpose. Beauty is both an essential correlate to poetry and an objective that transcends all others.” See Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, translated by Liu Youyuan et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, pp. 142-143.

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry , translated by Liu Youyuan et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, pp. 149-153.

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, translated by Liu Youyuan et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1991 edition, p. 281.

William of Ockham (c. 1285–1349) is regarded as the last scholastic philosopher of the Middle Ages. He underscored that concepts such as essence and principles are constructs of human thought and advocated for the principle of parsimony, famously known as “Ockham's Razor,” which advises against multiplying entities beyond necessity. Ockham valued experience and logic, holding the belief that logic could be independent of theology. He endeavored to distinctly separate reason from faith and epistemology from theology.

Balthasar, Introduction to Theological Aesthetics , edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, p. 181.

Balthasar, Introduction to Theological Aesthetics , edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, p. 134.

Balthasar, Introduction to Theological Aesthetics , edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, p. 205.

Balthasar, Introduction to Theological Aesthetics , edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, p. 54.

Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity , translated by Rong Zhenhua, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1984 edition, p. 117.

In 325 A.D., Constantine, the emperor of the Roman Empire, convened a council of Christian bishops in the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor, historically known as the “Council of Nicaea.” At this council, the “Nicene Creed” was adopted, establishing the doctrines of the Trinity and the dual nature of Christ as canonical, with any opposition to these doctrines deemed heretical.

Balthasar, Introduction to Theological Aesthetics , edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, pp. 51-52.

Balthasar, Introduction to Theological Aesthetics , edited by Liu Xiaofeng, translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, pp. 42-45.

Norman L. Geislet, Thomas Aquinas, An Evangelical Appraisal, Michigan: Baker Book House Company, 1991, p.62.

Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. 3: Dramatis Personae: The Person in Christ. Refer to Liu Xiaofeng, Towards the Truth of the Cross, Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing, 1995 edition, p. 380.

Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. 1, translated by Zhu Guangqian, Beijing: The Commercial Press, 1979 edition, pp. 7, 161.

Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Introduction, compiled by Liu Xiaofeng and translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, pp. 133-134.

Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Introduction , compiled by Liu Xiaofeng and translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, p. 109.

Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Introduction , compiled by Liu Xiaofeng and translated by Cao Weidong et al., Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002 edition, p. 130.

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Zhang, Z. (2024). The Position and Significance of Thomas Aquinas’s Aesthetic Thoughts in the History of Aesthetics. In: The Aesthetic Thought and View of Art of Thomas Aquinas. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-6899-8_5

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Foucault and Somaesthetics: Variations on the Art of Living

Richard shusterman.

This essay examines Foucault’s legacy in terms of its contribution to the field of somaesthetics.  It demonstrates how Foucault’s work on embodiment, care of the self, pleasure, sexuality, and aesthetics of existence were inspirational to the founding of somaesthetics and can serve as exemplars of somaesthetic philosophy. However, the essay also explores the ways that current somaesthetic research departs from Foucault’s theories by critiquing their limitations with respect to several important issues. These issues include the varieties of pleasure, the multicultural scope and diversity of ars erotica , the range of aesthetics and art, and the demand for truth and heroism in the art of living a beautiful life. 

Author Biography

Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University and Director of its Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. His Pragmatist Aesthetics is published in fifteen languages. His recent books include Body Consciousness , Thinking through the Body, and Ars Erotica (all with Cambridge University Press), Philosophy and the Art of Writing (Routledge), and a graphic bilingual novel based on his work in performance art, The Adventures of the Man in Gold/Les aventures de l’homme en or (Paris: Hermann). The French government awarded him the title of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques for his cultural work.

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Stenslie, Stahl, "Stelarc: On the body as an Artistic Medium," Journal of Somaesthetics 1:1 (2015), 20-41. https://doi.org/10.5278/ojs.jos.v1i0.1070

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van Gulik, Robert, Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D.. Leiden: Brill, 1961.

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As a Teenager in Europe, I Went to Nudist Beaches All the Time. 30 Years Later, Would the Experience Be the Same?

In July 2017, I wrote an article about toplessness for Vogue Italia. The director, actor, and political activist Lina Esco had emerged from the world of show business to question public nudity laws in the United States with 2014’s Free the Nipple . Her film took on a life of its own and, thanks to the endorsement from the likes of Miley Cyrus, Cara Delevingne, and Willow Smith, eventually developed into a whole political movement, particularly on social media where the hashtag #FreeTheNipple spread at lightning speed. The same year as that piece, actor Alyssa Milano tweeted “me too” and encouraged others who had been sexually assaulted to do the same, building on the movement activist Tarana Burke had created more than a decade earlier. The rest is history.

In that Vogue article, I chatted with designer Alessandro Michele about a shared memory of our favorite topless beaches of our youth. Anywhere in Italy where water appeared—be it the hard-partying Riviera Romagnola, the traditionally chic Amalfi coast and Sorrento peninsula, the vertiginous cliffs and inlets of Italy’s continuation of the French Côte d’Azur or the towering volcanic rocks of Sicily’s mythological Riviera dei Ciclopi—one was bound to find bodies of all shapes and forms, naturally topless.

In the ’90s, growing up in Italy, naked breasts were everywhere and nobody thought anything about it. “When we look at our childhood photos we recognize those imperfect breasts and those bodies, each with their own story. I think of the ‘un-beauty’ of that time and feel it is actually the ultimate beauty,” Michele told me.

Indeed, I felt the same way. My relationship with toplessness was part of a very democratic cultural status quo. If every woman on the beaches of the Mediterranean—from the sexy girls tanning on the shoreline to the grandmothers eating spaghetti al pomodoro out of Tupperware containers under sun umbrellas—bore equally naked body parts, then somehow we were all on the same team. No hierarchies were established. In general, there was very little naked breast censorship. Free nipples appeared on magazine covers at newsstands, whether tabloids or art and fashion magazines. Breasts were so naturally part of the national conversation and aesthetic that Ilona Staller (also known as Cicciolina) and Moana Pozzi, two porn stars, cofounded a political party called the Love Party. I have a clear memory of my neighbor hanging their party’s banner out his window, featuring a topless Cicciolina winking.

A lot has changed since those days, but also since that initial 2017 piece. There’s been a feminist revolution, a transformation of women’s fashion and gender politics, the absurd overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction in New York, the intensely disturbing overturning of Roe v Wade and the current political battle over reproductive rights radiating from America and far beyond. One way or another, the female body is very much the site of political battles as much as it is of style and fashion tastes. And maybe for this reason naked breasts seem to populate runways and street style a lot more than they do beaches—it’s likely that being naked at a dinner party leaves more of a permanent mark than being naked on a glamorous shore. Naked “dressing” seems to be much more popular than naked “being.” It’s no coincidence that this year Saint Laurent, Chloé, Ferragamo, Tom Ford, Gucci, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, and Valentino all paid homage to sheer dressing in their collections, with lacy dresses, see-through tops, sheer silk hosiery fabric, and close-fitting silk dresses. The majority of Anthony Vaccarello’s fall 2024 collection was mostly transparent. And even off the runway, guests at the Saint Laurent show matched the mood. Olivia Wilde appeared in a stunning see-through dark bodysuit, Georgia May Jagger wore a sheer black halter top, Ebony Riley wore a breathtaking V-neck, and Elsa Hosk went for translucent polka dots.

In some strange way, it feels as if the trends of the ’90s have swapped seats with those of today. When, in 1993, a 19-year-old Kate Moss wore her (now iconic) transparent, bronze-hued Liza Bruce lamé slip dress to Elite Model Agency’s Look of the Year Awards in London, I remember seeing her picture everywhere and feeling in awe of her daring and grace. I loved her simple sexy style, with her otherworldly smile, the hair tied back in a bun. That very slip has remained in the collective unconscious for decades, populating thousands of internet pages, but in remembering that night Moss admitted that the nude look was totally unintentional: “I had no idea why everyone was so excited—in the darkness of Corinne [Day’s] Soho flat, the dress was not see-through!” That’s to say that nude dressing was usually mostly casual and not intellectualized in the context of a larger movement.

But today nudity feels loaded in different ways. In April, actor and author Julia Fox appeared in Los Angeles in a flesh-colored bra that featured hairy hyper-realist prints of breasts and nipples, and matching panties with a print of a sewn-up vagina and the words “closed” on it, as a form of feminist performance art. Breasts , an exhibition curated by Carolina Pasti, recently opened as part of the 60th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Franchetti and showcases works that span from painting and sculpture to photography and film, reflecting on themes of motherhood, empowerment, sexuality, body image, and illness. The show features work by Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, and an incredible painting by Bernardino Del Signoraccio of Madonna dell’Umiltà, circa 1460-1540. “It was fundamental for me to include a Madonna Lactans from a historical perspective. In this intimate representation, the Virgin reveals one breast while nurturing the child, the organic gesture emphasizing the profound bond between mother and child,” Pasti said when we spoke.

Through her portrayal of breasts, she delves into the delicate balance of strength and vulnerability within the female form. I spoke to Pasti about my recent musings on naked breasts, which she shared in a deep way. I asked her whether she too noticed a disparity between nudity on beaches as opposed to the one on streets and runways, and she agreed. Her main concern today is around censorship. To Pasti, social media is still far too rigid around breast exposure and she plans to discuss this issue through a podcast that she will be launching in September, together with other topics such as motherhood, breastfeeding, sexuality, and breast cancer awareness.

With summer at the door, it was my turn to see just how much of the new reread on transparency would apply to beach life. In the last few years, I noticed those beaches Michele and I reminisced about have grown more conservative and, despite being the daughter of unrepentant nudists and having a long track record of militant topless bathing, I myself have felt a bit more shy lately. Perhaps a woman in her 40s with two children is simply less prone to taking her top off, but my memories of youth are populated by visions of bare-chested mothers surveilling the coasts and shouting after their kids in the water. So when did we stop? And why? When did Michele’s era of “un-beauty” end?

In order to get back in touch with my own naked breasts I decided to revisit the nudist beaches of my youth to see what had changed. On a warm day in May, I researched some local topless beaches around Rome and asked a friend to come with me. Two moms, plus our four children, two girls and two boys of the same ages. “Let’s make an experiment of this and see what happens,” I proposed.

The kids all yawned, but my friend was up for it. These days to go topless, especially on urban beaches, you must visit properties that have an unspoken nudist tradition. One of these in Rome is the natural reserve beach at Capocotta, south of Ostia, but I felt a bit unsure revisiting those sands. In my memory, the Roman nudist beaches often equated to encounters with promiscuous strangers behind the dunes. I didn’t want to expose the kids, so, being that I am now a wise adult, I went ahead and picked a compromise. I found a nude-friendly beach on the banks of the Farfa River, in the rolling Sabina hills.

We piled into my friend’s car and drove out. The kids were all whining about the experiment. “We don’t want to see naked mums!” they complained. “Can’t you just lie and say you went to a nudist beach?”

We parked the car and walked across the medieval fairy-tale woods until we reached the path that ran along the river. All around us were huge trees and gigantic leaves. It had rained a lot recently and the vegetation had grown incredibly. We walked past the remains of a Roman road. The colors all around were bright green, the sky almost fluorescent blue. The kids got sidetracked by the presence of frogs. According to the indications, the beach was about a mile up the river. Halfway down the path, we bumped into a couple of young guys in fanny packs. I scanned them for signs of quintessential nudist attitude, but realized I actually had no idea what that was. I asked if we were headed in the right direction to go to “the beach”. They nodded and gave us a sly smile, which I immediately interpreted as a judgment about us as mothers, and more generally about our age, but I was ready to vindicate bare breasts against ageism.

We reached a small pebbled beach, secluded and bordered by a huge trunk that separated it from the path. A group of girls was there, sharing headphones and listening to music. To my dismay they were all wearing the tops and bottoms of their bikinis. One of them was in a full-piece bathing suit and shorts. “See, they are all wearing bathing suits. Please don’t be the weird mums who don’t.”

At this point, it was a matter of principle. My friend and I decided to take our bathing suits off completely, if only for a moment, and jumped into the river. The boys stayed on the beach with full clothes and shoes on, horrified. The girls went in behind us with their bathing suits. “Are you happy now? my son asked. “Did you prove your point?”

I didn’t really know what my point actually was. I think a part of me wanted to feel entitled to those long-gone decades of naturalism. Whether this was an instinct, or as Pasti said, “an act that was simply tied to the individual freedom of each woman”, it was hard to tell. At this point in history, the two things didn’t seem to cancel each other out—in fact, the opposite. Taking off a bathing suit, at least for my generation who never had to fight for it, had unexpectedly turned into a radical move and maybe I wanted to be part of the new discourse. Also, the chances of me going out in a fully sheer top were slim these days, but on the beach it was different. I would always fight for an authentic topless experience.

After our picnic on the river, we left determined to make our way—and without children—to the beaches of Capocotta. In truth, no part of me actually felt very subversive doing something I had been doing my whole life, but it still felt good. Once a free breast, always a free breast.

This article was originally published on British Vogue .

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