Posts Tagged ‘aesthetics’

Feb
03
2012

“Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg

THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1 

Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1916 for the Voice of America’s “Forum Lectures,” was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in 1965, ’66, ‘74, ’78, and 1982.   The article achieved a canonical status and served as one of the definitive statements of formalism as a mode of visual analysis and of formalism as a critical stance, and possibly, of formalism as a mode of making art.   In his 1961 essay on “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) defined “Modernism” as the period (in art) roughly from the mid-1850s to his present that displayed a self-critical tendency in the arts.

Greenberg considered Immanuel  Kant the first Modernist.  The essence of Kant’s thesis was the employment of the characteristic “methods” of the discipline to “criticize the discipline itself.”  According to Greenberg, Kant used logic to establish “the limits of logic.”  The Modernist goal of self-criticism grows out of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment philosophical system which was based upon the belief in the power of rational thought and human reason. “Critique,” as a method, analyzes from the inside, from within the object being examined and does not judge from the outside, according to external criteria.

Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. Painting, according to Enlightenment methodology, must be interrogated according to its inherent purposes.  The key term here would be “inherent,” for analyzing an object according to its essential definition must preclude bringing forward any non-essential or external criteria. In other words, a painting telling a “good story” is not necessarily a good painting.   In this article, Greenberg carries on his attempt to “save” and to define “high art,” and “Modernist Painting” of 1960 can be compared to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.  Two decades had passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position.  His crusade was all the more urgent in 1961, as territory of the avant-garde was being invaded by popular culture and the forces of disrule, exemplified by Neo-Dada and Pop Art and Fluxus.  Greenberg had also shifted his political position, from being an intellectual Marxist, to being a Kantian formalist, a far safer situation which removes the critic and art from current cultural considerations.

Greenberg stated that art can “save” itself from being entertainment by demonstrating that the experience it provides is “unobtainable from any other source.” It is the task of art to demonstrate that which is “unique” and “irreducible”, particular or peculiar to art and that which determines the operation peculiar and exclusive to itself.  All effects borrowed from any other medium must be eliminated, rendering the art form pure.  “Purity” becomes a guarantee of “quality” and “independence” of avant-garde art.  All extrinsic effects should be eliminated from painting.

One could say that it is not the essential to the definition of a painting that it re-create the world realistically.  Today, that role can be fulfilled by photography or film.  Film and theater are defined by storytelling and narrative, enhanced by illusions of everyday reality.  Following Greenberg’s line of reasoning, realism and story telling and illusionism should be eliminated from painting.   For Greenberg, art was used to call attention to art.  Clement Greenberg logically worked out the limitations and peculiarities of painting, which are a flat surface, the shape of the support and the properties of the pigment. These physical and material limiting conditions became positive factors.

Once suppressed by artists through under-painting and glazing, these material aspects of painting were now acknowledged by Modernist painters.  Because he appeared to have considered and taken into account the limitations of painting as the application of paint upon a flat surface, or a stretched canvas, Édouard Manet is designated by Greenberg as the first Modernist artist.  Manet “declared the surface;” his follower, Paul Cézanne, fit the drawing and design into the rectangle of the painting.  In Modernist painting, the spectator is made aware of the flatness and sees the picture first, before noting the content.

Modernist painting abandoned the principle of representation of Renaissance illusionistic space inhabited by three-dimensional objects, giving the effect of looking through the canvas into a world beyond. Modernist painting resists the sculptural, which is suppressed or expelled.  The question is that of a purely optical experience.  With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting.  For this critic, “art” carries within itself its own teleology.  As art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure, more reductive in its means.  More is eliminated—subject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrative—and art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract.  Content becomes completely dissolved into form.  Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction, reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.

The essay noted that Modernism “resists sculpture” or three-dimensionality and reminded the reader that this “resistance” was by no mean recent. The critic pointed to Jacques-Louis David as an example of an artist whose work was flat and surface based.  Greenberg insisted that the scientific method justified the demand that painting (and art) limit itself to “what is given in visual experience.”   Greenberg equated the artist to the scientists, both of whom “test” and experiment.  The equation of art with science, replaces his earlier equation of the avant-garde with politics:  “…a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.”  One can “only look” at a work of visual art, which is discernible only to the “eye.”  Poetry is “literary,” art is not and should not attempt to be, for as Greenberg reminded us, any translation of the literary into the visual “loses” the literary qualities.

Like Avant-garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, had a subtext, Enlightenment philosophy, especially that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  The 1939 article concerned itself with aesthetics but more with the “experience” of the aesthetic.  In Avant-garde and Kitsch, it is possible to believe that Greenberg was writing of the experience of the aesthetic in terms of the placement of art in the culture, in other words, it is not so much the “how” of the experience but of the “where” of the aesthetic.  In Modernist Painting, the experience of the aesthetic is located in the realm of the how one looks at a work of art.

The proper attitude of the spectator was important to Kant who recommended a posture of detachment from personal desire and indifference to artistic content in search of a universal means of judging the efficacy of art.  The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God.  Kant was not interested in defining what “art” was but in establishing the ground for the judgment of art.  Working in the new philosophical field, aesthetics, Kant attempted to establish the epistemology of art, based, not in individual works but in a method of knowledge.

Greenberg’s understanding of Kant led him to use the methodology of critique but the critic took “critique” in a rather different direction.  Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress.  Modernist art, if one understands the essay correctly, seems to “progress” and move forward in time, away from manifestations of extrinsic properties and towards a purity of means.  “Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up, it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.”

The ground has shifted away from a means of judgment (Kant) to a theory of the evolution of art along telelogical lines with a goal in mind: purity.  Even though as Greenberg pointed out, “The first mark made on the canvas destroys its virtual flatness,” purity seems to imply a historical rejection of representation and a validation of abstraction. The point of noting Greenberg’s development of Kantian theory and its application toward Modernist Painting is that, without the notion of progress, the critic’s theory of artistic development would have to include some of the masters of flatness, such as William Bourguereau and some of the masters of the surface such as Thomas Kincaide, both of whom Greenberg would have excluded from the family tree of modernism.

While Kant would at least judge these two artists (and perhaps find them wanting), Greenberg seems to imply a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde and establish ground for exclusion of the unworthy. The oppositions of the dialectic are implied: those who did not follow the path of Modernist reductionism were, like dinosaurs, left behind.  If one reads in a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde, even if only through the names of the canonical artists Greenberg mentioned and thought his previous articles, then the conflation between the continuity of art and the avant-garde, which supposedly breaks with the past, becomes rather awkward.     Indeed, Greenberg does not mention the avant-garde, he uses the term “authentic art,” instead.

“Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity.  Art is, among many other things, continuity.  Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as modernist art would be impossible,” Greenberg stated.

However, as pointed out in his earlier work, Greenberg refused to connect the avant-garde with a rejection of the past: “…the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to ‘experiment’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving…” (Greenberg’s italics).  The underlying continuity of the two articles can be seen in the precursor remark in the 1939 writing on the role of the avant-garde artist: “’Art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.” Given the openness of the construction of this essay and the plurality of texts mobilized by Greenberg, it is no wonder that “Modernist Painting” lent itself to so many causes, whether as a rallying point or as a bête noir.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art, Modern Culture | No Comments »

Mar
19
2010

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

“Art” and what the term means and how the object is apprehended and the discourse that surrounds its objects emanates out of aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.  The discourse about art, art criticism, art history, and art theory all are variations on philosophy.  Kant’s use of aesthetics was to establish the grounds for the viewing of art—disinterestedness—the grounds for beauty—necessity—and absolute universality of aesthetic criteria.  In many ways, his philosophy is divided.  On one hand, there is absoluteness and rules of judging; but, on the other hand, there is the new Romantic artist who is called upon to “play” and to create new “rules” for art by breaking rules through creative invention.  It will be up to Friedrich Schiller to expound upon this gap in Kantian philosophy by concentrating on the artist.

Schiller was writing his essays at a pivotal moment in time.  Germany was not yet a unified or modern country, nor did it have a powerful middle class.  As a nation it had yet to be industrialized and faced another century and a half of autocratic rule, and, yet Romanticism with its emphasis on the individual somehow managed to thrive in artistic circles.  Schiller died four decades before Marx would re-define alienation but the poet foresaw what the philosopher would witness, the splitting of the modern personality, rent between intellect and emotion.  Schiller’s stress on the emotional aspects of alienation is best understood in response to the subjectivism of the Romantic era and as an answer to the highly artificial age of the Enlightenment, which stressed reason and rationality in the name of nature, creating an overly mannered society through rules.  Acutely aware of the modern agony of alienation, Schiller sought to lead humans towards wholeness through art, where intellect and emotions could be resolved into a healthy and united whole.  Art allows all aspects of the mind to indulge in “free play” and creates a place where reason and passion can become balanced into a perfected form.

If Kant is the “head” or “intellect” of aesthetics, then Schiller is the “heart” of art philosophy.  While Kant’s discussion of art was strictly conceptual and abstract, Schiller was a poet himself and knew of the problems and rewards of creation.  But Schiller was also a playwright and a philosopher who was aware of his condition as a “hermaphrodite” or a hybrid creature: the artist who was also a philosopher.  But Schiller the artist appeared in his philosophical writings only in his poetic and rhetorical tone, for he rarely wrote on art itself.  Schiller followed not just the lead of Kant but also the lead of Baumgarten in writing aesthetics for the Romantic period.  Kant wrote of the abstract arabesque as his ideal form of the beautiful, but Baumgarten had envisioned art as having a more central role in human life and so did Schiller.  “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, 1795, concerns itself with the importance of the “aesthetic” that is the sensuous as a counterpoint to the intellectual for the development of the human being.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment was the capstone of his epistemological theory, but Schiller was concerned less with theory and more with the predicament of modern life.

“On the Aesthetic Education of Man” was written as a series of letters to the Duke of Augustenburg and was published in 1795 and 1801.  “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” was also written in 1795 as a response to his friendship with Germany’s most celebrated Romantic poet, Göethe, comparing himself as a poet to his friend as a poet.  Johann Wolfgang von Göethe had written the quintessential work of German Romanticism, the rather overwrought, Sorrows of Young Werther, the fictional version of many youthful love affairs.  However, as he matured, Göethe assumed a mantle of dignity, of near-Olympian calm, and repudiated Romanticism as “sick” and extolled (neo) Classicism as “healthy”.  The famous friendship got off to a rocky start.  Göethe spurned the advances of the younger poet whose dramatic plays were associated with Romanticism.  And Schiller, for his part, viewed Göethe with antipathy, distrusting the apparent ease with which poetry apparently flowed from this distinguished inhabitant of Olympia.  Nevertheless, the younger poet who experienced creative agonies and self-doubts was driven by a need to understand Göethe and pursued the poet.  The two men eventually succeeded in achieving a meeting of the minds and their consequent correspondence and collaboration is of great importance to German literature.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics | No Comments »

Mar
05
2010

Kant and Art for Art’s Sake

Kant and “Art for Art’s Sake”

The beautiful, for Kant, is “that which without any concept is cognitized as the object of necessary satisfaction.”  The status of aesthetic judgment is not empirical but logical, based upon the powers of human reason and rationality, which excludes internal and external purposiveness.  Kant introduces purposiveness without a purpose, allowing the mind of the one who contemplates art free, unrestricted play of the mental faculties.  Within the Romantic movement, artists were believed to have the right to exist for the sole purpose of making art and art supposedly existed for the sole purpose of being art.  Art for art’s sake is such a powerful (and necessary) concept, so pervasive and entrenched that it is one of the most important motivating forces behind art to this day.  With the initiation of “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined, perhaps by Benjamin Constant, in response to or as a definition of Kant’s ideas, the artist and the work of art now had a purpose again—not a social purpose but a purpose that was strictly an art purpose.  Confronting the staid and serious Neoclassic was its rival “ism”, Romanticism, which championed the artist as a genius and art as an expression of that genius—concepts that were pure Kant.

“Art for art’s sake” is a particular concept developed within the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics.  These terms: “art for art’s sake,”  “aestheticism” and “aesthetics” are not interchangeable.  Also not to be confused with Kantian aesthetic theory is Aestheticism, which was an artistic movement in late Nineteenth Century England.   English Aestheticism was an attitude on the part of art makers and art appreciators, based upon the desire to make every object “artful” and beautiful, regardless of its utilitarian or use value.  Late Nineteenth Century  Aestheticism was a desire to combine art and life and life and beauty.  “Art for art’s sake” was an aspect of aesthetics, a Kantian derived concept, completely divorced from any specific work of art or from any particular art movement.  The independence of aesthetics from art is best illustrated when we picture Kant, an elderly and retiring philosopher professor who denied himself all sensual pleasures in his pursuit of the intellect.  Living in a backwater university town, he never went to museums and did not own any art, and yet he was able to reason his way to the solution of grounding the response to art, which is personal and therefore subjective (based in the viewing subject) in an intellectual framework that is impersonal and objective.

The intellectual framework devised by Kant is aesthetics or the grounds for the definition of art.  Kant set art free from content, subject matter, the client’s wishes, the community’s desires and the needs of religion.  The idea of art being given wholly over to aesthetic pleasure and delight was the ultimate freedom of art to exist on its own merits and to be the center of its own world.  Art lived and died by its own art rules and justified its own existence in terms of its separate universe.  Art was autonomous and free.  Kant’s ahistorical or transcendental ideas did not go unnoticed, and they were conveyed by German expatriates to post-Revolution French intellectuals and artists, who were increasingly alienated from society and adrift without the traditional patrons of Church and State.  Suddenly socially “useless” without their historical missions, certain artists found Kant’s concepts very appealing and timely.

The Critique of Judgment (1790) contained the right ideas at the right time: ideas, which were a fortuitous response to an artistic crisis.  What does an artist do?  How does an artist make art and why?  Why is it that certain objects are universally called “art?”  What are the common characteristics of these objects?  What is their “art-ness?”  Kant’s answers came, by the 20th century, to be commonly called formalism.  Attention to Form in Kantian philosophy, or art for art’s sake, separates art from its traditional role as purveyor of subject matter on the command of a patron.  But there is a difference between what Kant wrote and what his followers made of his ideas.  For Kant, formalism is a mode of apprehending and emphasizes direct experience or intuitional awareness, without consideration of practical implications, of a work of art.  The cultivation of aesthetic experience as a deliberate value was the work of Kant, who developed critical criterion for the aptness of a work of art for appreciation, based upon its formal properties, rather than upon practical significance or importance of subject matter.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics | No Comments »

Feb
19
2010

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

 

While Kant was writing the Critique of Judgment, 1790, the answer of the role of the artist in society was increasingly unclear, and the social and cultural situation was increasingly unstable.  The artist was looking at an abyss, gazing into the unknown of a new era, when Kant solved the problem of art and shaped its definition for the next two centuries.  Kant began with assumptions common to his time: we can recognize “art” and we know what “art” is and that “art” is something we can see.  He also assumes “beauty” and its existence. Kant never dealt with specific works of art and thus was removed from the current taste and vogue for classical art.  Neo-classicism was the new art in Kant’s time, and it was, briefly, a revolutionary art movement denoting (Greek) freedom and democracy and the promise of individuality, along with (Roman) gravitas and stability.  But Neoclassicism was quickly co-opted by post-Revolutionary Academicism.  A once-revolutionary movement became a forced and regulated status quo.  The Neo-Classical ideal of beauty, before the ideals became rules, was associated with the art of ancient Athens, considered eternal and transcendent.  As Keats best expressed it, in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

….

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats (1795 – 1821)

Although Emmanuel Kant did not invent aesthetics, he formalized the philosophical concept and elaborated aesthetics into a new notion of art that turned out to be uniquely suited to the new century.  “Aesthetics” was that which is sensuous or the perception of sense data.  Aesthetics has evolved into a more inclusionary definition that is applied to the arts but in the middle of the Eighteenth Century when A. G. Baumgarten founded a “new science” and published Aesthetica in 1750, aesthetics connected art to life.  For the first time “art” became a distinctive value in life and was considered a mode of knowledge, called aesthetics or feelings registered by the subject/viewer in response to the stimulus of an art object. Regardless of the intent of the client or of the artist, the art object is a unique object in that it is contemplated for insight and delight.  Baumgarten widened the field of aesthetics from art to human conduct, opening possibilities for another philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, who would build upon Kantian aesthetics.  Aesthetics is a middle ground, existing somewhere between reason and morality.  Aesthetics concerned itself with that which was material or sensuous or plastic—physical life.  Like other aspects of human experience, aesthetics needed to be brought into the Kantian epistemological system.

Aesthetics is a dualistic concept, a philosophical play between the artist and the art critic or philosopher.  Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy is not concerned with particular works of art but is more concerned with the question of “art” itself.  Aesthetics like any other branch of philosophy, attempts to determine the grounds of “art,” its ontology, and the system of knowledge that produces and constructs the mode of judgment or contemplation of art, its epistemology.  Once art had been justified as an activity legitimated by its role in society as teacher and instructor and educator, working for the benefit of the community.  In the modern period, art needed two things.  First, a reason for being: ontology, and second, a definition: epistemology.  Although it was not Kant’s precise intention to create a new meaning and purpose for art, the effects of his philosophy was to link art to personal expressiveness and individual freedom. It was Kant who ushered in Romanticism by devising a theory of aesthetics that perfectly suited the times.

Given that aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, Kant proceeded by putting art into his transcendental system.  As is characteristic of his system, the idea of art was divided into two parts that correspond to self and object, that is, contemplation by the viewer of the work of art itself.  The ontology of a work of art is not the object, not even the artist, but the recognition of “art” which is a perceptual and conceptual act.  Too see is to judge/contemplate.  Art vision, like any vision, is never raw; it is always tempered and educated and acts according to (Kantian) rules.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) was the third in his trilogy of epistemology.  In his first two Critiques, Kant established new ground for reason and morality and the third Critique had to establish a universal and transcendent basis for making a judgment.

What did one have the occasion to judge?  To select the judgment of art as the centerpiece of this critique was a very modern move on the part of a man who had little experience of art himself.  But art was not amenable to judgment under a system of laws from the state and did not fall within the sphere of morality.  Simply by removing art from the rule of law or morality was to free it from its age-old tutelage at the hands of the powerful or the religious.  Like the rest of society, art had become secular, and, in becoming secular, had lost its place in society.  Coincidentally, Kant was writing at the precise time the artist was losing the class that had been the traditional patrons, the aristocrats, to the guillotine in France.  In the Nineteenth Century, the purpose of art and the role of artists were questions, and, regardless of his intentions, Kant’s aesthetics proved to be the new answers.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com


Share

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics | No Comments »

Feb
12
2010

Kant and Aesthetics

Kant and Aesthetics

France became the titular home of the Enlightenment because of the necessity of opposing the decadence of the ancien régime, but it must be recalled that there were numerous important philosophers in England as well—the Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume–who were operating in a more “enlightened” society where royal power had long since been effectively curbed.  England had had its revolution, endured the rule of the middle class, the Puritans, and had gladly restored the monarchy in 1688.  The English, wary of religious extremism, established a careful balance of power between the Crown and the People.  The British had learned the hard way of the power of the people when the American colonies rebelled and fought their way to freedom, using the ideas of the Enlightenment that were developed in Europe.  The American Revolution was a philosophical affair, a grand experiment in democracy.  To the amazement and alarm of Europeans, the Americans were turning philosophical systems into a Constitution, a government, and a way of life. And yet, it was in what we can only call “the Germanies,” not yet a modern nation, but a collection of principalities, that philosophers synthesized Enlightenment philosophy and extended it to a world now called “modern.”

“Dare to reason—have the courage to use your own minds—is the motto of the Enlightenment.” This powerful statement, defining the Enlightenment, was written by Emmanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) in 1784 in Germany, a singularly un-Enlightened land.  In his essay, “What is Enlightenment?”  Kant defined the Enlightenment briefly and cogently as the foundation of a new conception of the essential qualities of the state and of history.  “History” exists as a concept, according to Kant, only in relation to a series of events moving towards an ideal unity or an immanent end. Writing at the end of a period, Kant coupled history with a teleological purpose.  The question, for the Enlightenment philosopher, is that of the goals of history.  The contemplators of past events–the historians–are no longer standing in the midst of a simple series of discrete events, but are philosophers observing a series of actions that include the idea of individual freedom. History was a process of self-liberation, a process from natural bondage towards a sense of individual becoming in a spiritual sense.

In place of irrational belief systems, the Enlightenment has created a doctrine of rational faith (perhaps a contradiction in terms)—faith in the powers of human reason.  Kant has been called the First Modernist, probably because he was among the most significant late-Enlightenment philosophers.  Kant sought to solve the problems put forward or suggested by the early Enlightenment philosophers.  He had to establish an epistemology of knowledge based upon the deductive powers of human reason.  He had to establish a system of modern morality and ethics for human behavior, without God.  He had to establish a universal means of arriving at a judgment recognized universally as being valid.  Ultimately, Kant had to create an architectural structure for the new individual in an Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is deeply concerned with politics: how people can rule and/or be ruled without God or King and the divine right of aristocracy.  The issue of freedom must be balanced against morals and truths and social controls.  Society and culture are in a state of change and flux and doubt under pressure from the rising aspirations of the lower classes and the growing power of the middle class.  Enlightenment philosophy both witnesses these changes and seeks to contain an unprecedented social situation that upends prevailing traditions.  Art is but one casualty of a culture, which goes into shock by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century.  Thus Kant’s aesthetic philosophy became the right philosophy for the right time—his ideas restored order and purpose, ironically by injecting art with the disorder of originality and stripping it of all purpose but its own.  Kantian aesthetics developed out of a sense of crisis in the arts, which were unanchored without traditional purpose or patronage, bereft of subject matter and content, once dictated, and validated by Church and State.  Already, the artists in France had discovered the vagaries of the middle class public, the new audience to which they were subjected in public salons.  Equally depressing was the rise of yet another new enemy, the art critic who freely gave his (unlearned) influential opinion of the endeavors of the artists.  How should art be judged?  Who had the right to judge?  The jurors?  the teachers? the artists? the critics? the patrons? or the public?  The goal of Kant was to put judgment on a universal basis and, because art fell neatly into the realm of subjectivity, he used  art as his model in his discussion of aesthetics.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Share

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics | No Comments »

Oct
23
2009

Podcast Episode 4 Romantic Aesthetics

AESTHETICS AND TRE RISE OF ROMANTICISM

Emerging in the mid-eighteenth century, Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to define “art.”  The formulation of aesthetics as a separate aspect of Enlightenment thinking was a project of British and German writers on the arts.  By the end of the eighteenth century, Emmanuel Kant consolidated “aesthetics” into a coherent and influential book, the Critique of Judgment, which would shape the art world of the Romantic artists.

 

 

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics | No Comments »

Oct
16
2009

Podcast 5 Romantic Aesthetics

ART-FOR-ART’S SAKE

Aesthetics, as a branch of philosophy, was established in 1735 by Alexander Baumgartner in Germany.  The early development of aesthetics evolved from moral stances on art, espoused by Lord Shaftsbury and Winckelmann, became the basis for the modern definition of “art.”  This new definition of art was articulated by Kant and extended by Schiller.  Ideally suited to a modern world, ruled by the middle class, modern aesthetics ushered in the era of the independent Romantic artist and the concept of “art-for-art’s sake.”

 
Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art Podcasts | No Comments »

Sep
11
2009

The Enlightenment: Introduction

The Enlightenment: Introduction

Like any great cultural change, the Enlightenment was long in gestation.  By the Eighteenth Century, a critical mass of philosophical thinking and social custom had emerged, and, with it, certain famous intellectual heroes.  The Enlightenment can be understood precisely in terms of its entomology–that which sheds light: light into the darkness of religious “superstition”.  The principal conflict of the Enlightenment was the contest between established religious beliefs and a growing body of scientific knowledge that grounded knowledge, not in the will of God, but in an exercise of empirical evidence.  Upon this dialectic, struggles for social, political, and economic parity would be launched and would last to this very day. It is important to remember that the Enlightenment way of thinking is very Western and is a singular result in a particular place due to the impact of science and technology, resulting in the “death of God.”  Other areas of the world, such as Africa, were left out of technological progress and its benefits, and other areas, such as the Mid-East chose to not follow the secular path of the Europeans.  The result, two centuries later, would be a world split between those who took part in “Modernism” and those who did not.  The Enlightenment was a Western phenomenon, which established not only new philosophical ideas concerning the grounds of knowledge but also new ideals, such as “liberty, equality and fraternity,” “all men are created equal,” and the “inalienable right” of the “pursuit of happiness.”  These ideals would not be forgotten, but it would take time for the Enlightenment to become more than the ideals of speculative philosophers and to become a gradually unfolding reality.

A complex phenomenon, the Enlightenment was defined by one central question: how can life be lived and understood without God?  If God was “dead,” as Friedrich Nietzsche proposed, then the Deity was certainly an animated corpse, going to its demise, kicking and screaming, and becoming reanimated at unpredictable intervals.  The Enlightenment was confronted with Counter-Enlightenments, such as Romanticism and Catholic revivals, but politics, society and economics continued their inexorable march down the secular path.  Over time, Christianity came to occupy a smaller place in Western culture and ceased to be the basis for society’s belief system.   Once religious faith had permeated Western life and the answer to all questions was “God’s will.”  Unquestioning belief in God was challenged by two forces that proved to be critical to Enlightenment thinking.  First, was the idea  of “natural rights,” that is, the notion that people were created free and equal and had, as human beings, certain rights that could not be violated.  The concept of “natural rights” would be articulated by Enlightenment philosophers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Thomas Jefferson but it dated back to the Twelfth Century and was present in a nascent from during the Medieval era.  The second was the explosion of scientific experimentation and hypothesis that shattered doctrines supported by the Church. Although there were certain scientific discoveries that particularly irked the religious authorities, such as the findings of Copernicus and Galileo, the combined weight of empiricism and the scientific method undermined the ability of religion to insist upon unquestioning belief.  Doubt entered into society.  Western culture shifted decisively towards secular questions and secular answers.

The result of secularism was a ripple effect that questioned the validity of the “divine right to rule,” creating a question of how could society be governed without God.  It was not just a question of government in the sense of whether or not to continue with Kings and Emperors but government in the sense of self-governance.  Without religious edicts telling people what to do, what kind of system would take the place of God’s law?  Just as scientists rewrote the knowledge of the universe, philosophers sought a new epistemology or ground for social relations. But even more urgent was the problem of knowledge.  Without God, what was knowable and how?  A new epistemology of knowledge also had to be established.  The new philosophical system proposed a new society and a new form of knowledge that would have profound impact upon art and artists, creating new ways of defining both art and artist and developing an entirely new branch of philosophy called “aesthetics.” The idea of “artistic freedom” is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment introduction of the concept of the “individual.”  The idea of the defiant artist, challenging the establishment and shocking the conservative public is an Enlightenment concept of rethinking received wisdom.

The profound secularization that is the Enlightenment has installed suspicion of authority, tradition, and divine right to rule…at least in the West.  Using the deductive and logical practices of science, rational thinking, and the powers of human reason discovered universal laws, which appear to have taken the place of God, the Enlightenment ended eighteen hundred years of spiritualized thinking.  As Thomas Carlyle said, “Philosophers strove to sink the supernatural to the natural”.  The concepts of “Nature” and “Natural Law” and “Natural Rights” and “Progress” could be used as powerful weapons against traditional powers that once ruled by “divine right.”  The Enlightenment also had a dark side.  The proponents of this unsettling upheaval in society were able to go only so far in their thinking.  The concept of “nature” or the “natural” could be used as powerful weapons to deny participation and power to those declared to be outside the confines of progress, such as women and people of color who were tied to Nature and therefore were beyond the forces of History and thus, the democratic fruits of the new social system.  Emmanuel Kant once stated, “If someone asks are we living in an Enlightened Age today?  The answer would be, ‘No,’ but we are living in an age of Enlightenment.”  The Enlightenment could not guarantee fully enlightened thinking, but the alternative to the Enlightenment, with all of its a prorias was, as David Hume, remarked, “..stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance”.  The men who made the new laws were bold, brave and even arrogant, quite capable of using enlightened modes of thinking to justify slavery and imperialism, all in the name of European superiority.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

Share

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Modern Culture | No Comments »