What is Aestheticism? (Art for Art's Sake)
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- Опубликовано: 4 мар 2023
- An explanation of asetheticism, particularly as championed by Oscar Wilde, including 6 major tenets of aestheticism, including the purpose of art, whether life should copy art, the proper role of the critic, and whether art should follow ethical rules.
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Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! (#aesthetics #oscarwilde)
It's very difficult, in this particular time, to fully understand the import of what Wilde was getting at. Movies, Hollywood, mass media and its related movements have obscured much of what he said.
When he was writing, classical forms of music, literature, etc were still important and dominant, and popular and "for profit art" hadn't claimed center stage quite yet.
By "improving upon Nature" he meant something closer to "using Nature as the raw material for the artist to create a work that will, through its artifice, bring one closer to the Truth". A good example: regular old birdsong (certainly a beautiful thing), and Olivier Messaien's "Catalogue d'oiseaux" a huge piece written for piano that uses various birdsongs as its starting point. It's not at all just an imitation of the birdsongs, it's a transformation of them.
As for art and morality, this has more to do with the fight between the Wagnerians and the anti-Wagnerians (and other such artistic controversies). Wagner saw the sonata/allegro form as "Jewishness in music", because it relied on what was to him a "rigid set of laws" or usages, much like, in his mind, Jewish people obeyed the law of Moses. Whereas his, more "free form" (relatively) music was like the New Testament. Obviously, Wagner was rather anti-Semitic. But a lot of people agreed with him, and there were HUGE fights over the moral value inherent in each style of music. And people took this seriously enough that many musicians' careers were utterly ruined. And this is but one of many such controversies of the time.
Wilde tried, I think, to separate art from these considerations in order to help create a more open atmosphere, such that the artist might express themselves without censure.
Lest you think that the present time is free of such nonsense, consider a rock song that might have unmistakable pro Marxist overtones, or musicians who refuse to do what their record labels dictate to them in order to sell more music. Art is not, for good or for ill, "for its own sake". It's specifically created in order to make money. Hopefully, lots of it.
And I dare say: The greatest works of art were created for their own sake alone. Created, because a desire - pure artistic will - animated the creator; so that he might do justice to his Eros and gain a spark of eternity through his own monument. Did the dying Mozart work on his Requiem to earn extra money? To be doubted.
@@Koresos. Except that Mozart didn't write the Requiem, his student Hummel did, though this is a titanic debate.
Personally, I prefer to apply what Quentin Crisp said about writing to art. He said there were three reasons one might write, and perhaps the best writings were done due to a combination of all three: money, because you don't quite know what to do with those long winter evenings, and finally because you feel that you have something unique and important to say. Speaking as a classical musician, I can definitely say that even Beethoven, who was THE model of the independent artist, always had pecuniary considerations in mind (he died with a fortune). And as for the visual arts, never forget that the Venus of Urbino, arguably the greatest nude ever painted, was commissioned from Titian by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, as a "picture of a nude woman, to be hung in my bedchamber"
Indeed!
@@johnmanno2052 He actually wrote the main part of the Requiem before he died. The controversies are more about the somewhat nebulous history of the composition and the quality of his pupil's completion. Anyway.
Beethoven's pecuniary considerations are not surprising either, considering that he was also the person who counted coffee beans for his cup every time. All this rather testifies to autistic traits that are common to all geniuses. It is probably the desire to create order and system in one's own sense, coupled with talent, sweat, tears, iron discipline and perseverance.
The fact that Venus was created under the circumstances you described is, in turn, evidence of the artist's constant search for space in which to carry out his work. At that time, the rulers were the best possible environment for an artist, so he worked there and, as the Venus shows, only conformed to the client in the absolutely necessary points. The client could have been probably satisfied in a more simpler way. Incidentally, this is also the reason why tyrants and artists often get along so well; a phenomenon that was already discussed in Plato's time. The artist often only wants to fulfil his destiny, his life's work, at any cost.
This was really helpful, thank you!
In portraits, art imitates reality, but also interprets it.
Analytic Aesthetics are fun. Langer, Goodman, Collingwood, Danto etc.
Great info
This may be a question of value theory (in the philosophical sense) actually.
What's it like doing philosophy of art, when this isn't your chief interest or fortè?
Why would you put someone in prison for being gay?
How is nature "wrong?"
It can be wrong. Like when awful undesirable mutations spontaneously occur in living things
@@medardbitangimana4580 "undesirable" its just a human take to a mechanism, which without, we wouldn't be here. Nature just " is", it doesn't strive to be right or wrong, but only to preserve itself
@@joshuarestovich8537 in it's failure to preserve itself, it would be "wrong", and dies out completely. Wrong simply from the perspective of survival.
Art is not immoral because no one can be harmed by art substantially.
It is harder to demarcate art or good art than science. What would an aestheticist say about HR Grieger, Stanley Kubrick, HP Lovecraft, etc? All of these artists had amazing form, but I would not recommend imitating The Shining in life. Are these kind of artistic horror a direct refutation of aestheticism? If so, why are people still making videos about aestheticism?
Even though Art is very hard to define, I agree with you. I don't conceive a way in which Art can be immoral
Ideas don't need to be directly and universally applicable to be useful and valuable. They're ultimately tools. The more fleshed out lenses you have in your back pocket to flip through then apply when you get confused? The more you are going to be able to understand and empathize with. Just because aestheticism doesn't apply to the art you largely interact with personally does not negate its value.
Although not directly stated? From reading a handful of his essays personally, I think, Oscar Wilde understands this. His work is very intentionally meant to be kind of obnoxious? He's intentionally playing the mirror image of stringent Victorian morality. To put it simply? He's a satirist. He's making fun of things. You're not meant to take his work 100% seriously and he would probably tease you for doing so.
His essays are largely written as a dialouge, in a similar style to his plays, *because* he's actively applying his philosophy on art to his philosophic work. As an acknowledgment that metaphysical philosophy is art itself. A heightened form of reality that cannot actually exist.
Understanding a philosophic idea works best when set in it's historical context. He wouldn't say anything about Lovecraft, Geiger or Kubrick, because his work is a direct response to Victorian realism. Not metaphoric surrealist horror that attempts to invoke the ineffable emotions. Art that has a such a fundamentally different goal than the art Wilde is critiquing, that it's unreasonable to apply his ideas to.
Art can be dangerous. It's not harm in the day-to-day understanding of "harm". Art is the continuous public conversation on what we value as a society. This conversation in turn shapes society and culture. It is a slow hulking unassuming beast with more power than often given credit. Free speech in the west has allowed some people to forget this, despite the original intent of free speech being to do the opposite.
#ohShutUp
You also have Decadentism.