ugliness as beauty

How can ugliness be portrayed as beautiful in art? A monster, a serpent?

Since from evil comes good, it is therefore well said that evil contributes to good and hence it is said to be beautiful within the order of things. Thus it is not called beautiful in an absolute sense, but beautiful within the order; in fact, it would be preferable to say: "the order itself is beautiful."

- Alexander of Hales

Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden of Earthly Delights, Earthly Paradise (1506)

It is the task of many medieval mystics, theologians, and philosophers to show how, in the great symphony concert of cosmic harmony, monsters contribute, albeit purely by way of contrast (like shading and chiaroscuro in a picture) to the Beauty of the whole. Rabanus Maurus held that monsters were not against nature because they spring from the divine will. Hence, they are not against nature, but against the nature to which we are accustomed.

- Umberto Eco

The non-beautiful [Jesus' persecutors, serpents] were represented as a necessary phase that allowed for the resurrection of Christ that was ultimately beautiful--this was not the case with classical concepts of Beauty.

beauty evolves

Diego Velasquez - The Toliet of Venus (1651)

The Venus of Velasquez is seen from behind, and we see her face only as a reflection in the mirror. This artificiality of space and the elusive nature of womanly Beauty came together, in later centuries, in the women of Fragonard, where the dreamlike character of Beauty is already a harbinger of the extreme freedom of modern painting:

Jean-Honore Fragonard - The Removed Shirt (1760)

If there are no objective constraints for the representation of Beauty, then why not depict a bourgeois picnic on the grass complete with a beautiful nude?

Edouard Manet - Le dejeuner sur l'herbe (1863)

love is what we have decided that we value in life

Love is all its various forms is ultimately about caring--caring so deeply about another person, group, idea, or place that we would be willing to sacrifice our own health, comfort, and even life for it. One hallmark of great art is the amount of care that we sense has gone into it. When people scoff at modern painting, their typical objection is that it looks as though the painter simply threw paint on the canvas with no care. We find ourselves drawn to art that looks as though the artist struggled with it, put a great deal of thought into it--cared about it.

Love is about feeling that there is something bigger than just ourselves and our own worries and existence. Whether it is love of another person, of country, of God, of an idea, love is fundamentally an intense devotion to this notion that something is bigger than us. Love is ultimately larger than friendship, comfort, ceremony, knowledge, or joy.

- Daniel Levitin

proper use of rites and symbols

A ritual is nothing but the dramatic, visual, active manifestation or representation of a myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in the myth, and the myth works on you—provided of course, that you are caught up by the image.

But when you just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work magically and get you into heaven—because you know that when you’re baptized, you get into heaven, after all—you’ve turned away from the proper use of these rites and images.

First, think about your own childhood, the symbols--that were put into you that remain. Think not how they relate to an institution, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, activating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

It is my belief, drawn from experience, that there’s nothing better than comparative mythological studies to let you grasp the big, general form of an image and to give you many different ways of approaching that image. Images are eloquent in themselves; they talk to you. When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never exhaust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you. The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?

- Joseph Campbell

copyright

Titian - Venus of Urbino (1538)

Edouard Manet - Olympia (1863)

art in an age of mechanical reproduction

"What's appropriation art? It's when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context you change the connotation."

packaging matters

The point is that we don't really understand the role expectations play in the way we experience and evaluate art, literature, drama, architecture, food, wine--anything really. The packaging, the social environment, the narrative surrounding the product matter a lot.

Expectation is an important part of the way we experience music. Joshua Bell told me that it takes an appropriate setting to help people appreciate a live classical music performance. The listener needs to be sitting in a comfortable, faux velvet seat, and surrounded by the acoustics of a concert hall. And when people adorn themselves in silk, perfumes and cashmere, they seem to appreciate the costly performance much more.

“What if we did the opposite experiment?” I asked. “What if we put a mediocre player in Carnegie Hall with the Berlin Philharmonic? The expectations would be very high but the quality would not. Would people discern the difference would their pleasure be quashed?” Bell thought for a moment. “In this case,” he said, “the expectations would triumph over the experience.” Furthermore, he said he could think of a few people who were not great violinists but received wild praise because they were in the right environment.

Across many domains of life, expectations play a huge role in the way we end up experiencing things. Think about the Mona Lisa. Why is this portrait so beautiful, and why is the woman’s smile mysterious? Can you discern the technique and talent it took for Leonardo da Vinci to create it? For most of us the painting is beautiful, and the smile mysterious, because we are told it is so. In the absence of expertise or perfect information, we look for social cues to help us figure out how much we are, or should be, impressed, and our expectations take care of the rest.

Alexander Pope once wrote: “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” To me, it seems that Pope’s advice is the best way to live an objective life. Clearly, it is also very helpful in eliminating the effects of negative expectations. But what about positive expectations? If I listen to Joshua Bell with no expectations, the experience is not going to be nearly as satisfying or pleasurable as if I listen to him and say to myself, “My god, how lucky I am to he listening to Joshua Bell play live in front of me.” My knowledge that Bell is one of the best players in the world contributes immeasurably to my pleasure.

As it turns out, positive expectations allow us to enjoy things more and improve our perception of the world around us. The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get. The danger of expecting nothing is that, in the end, it might be all we’ll get.

- Dan Ariley

multiperspectivism

Einstein put to rest the idea of a single, knowable, objective reality. Einstein rejected the notion of absolute time, arguing that tune itself was a perspectival effect determined by the relative motion between an observer and the object being observed.

It was the artists of the period, however, who had the biggest impact on changing the perspective on perspective. Recall that the invention of perspective in art was perhaps the single most important development of the Renaissance. The artists broke with medieval renderings of the world as a great chain of being ascending floating from the depths of earthly existence to the heavenly gates. The use of perspective took the human gaze away from the heavens toward the linear plane of an earthly world populated by subjects and objects. The gaze was no longer meant to conjure up the exultant expectation of ascending to the world above but, rather, an impartial ordering of the objective world below. Francis Bacon’s scientific method and, later on, the rationalism of Enlightenment philosophers flowed inexorably and, in no small part, from the reorientation of time and space rendered by Renaissance artists on their canvases.

Paul Cezanne was the first to break ranks with the long tradition of the single perspective in art. His Still Life with a Basket of Apples, depicts a table from different perspectives. The artist became obsessed with the multiperspective approach to the canvas. He wrote his son in 1906, conveying his sense of excitement:

Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are plentiful the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending more to the right or left.

Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon introduced the new idea of Cubism in art. In the painting, two figures are shown frontally, “but with noses in sharp profile. The seated figure has her back to the viewer but her head is seen from the front.”

Cubism was a highbrow artistic expression that appealed far more to the avant-garde elites in Paris, London, and New York. The masses, however, were introduced to changes in temporal and spatial orientation by way of a lowbrow artistic medium—the cinema. Movies played with temporal and spatial orientations in ways that more resembled what occur in the unconscious during dreams. The linearity of everyday experience gave way to scenes that cut effortlessly to the past and future and to other places and times, forcing the viewer to readjust the way he or she absorbed and integrated temporal and spatial information that was out of sequence. Splitting the screen allowed one to view two events unfolding simultaneously in different places. By freezing frames, the director could give the sense slowing time to a halt. Comedies often sped up the movement into a madcap romp or reversed movement: for example, showing a diver coming out of the water and up onto the diving board—to the howls of the audience.

The manipulation of temporal and spatial orientation took moviegoers out of their conscious reality of normal temporal and sequential order and into a fantasy world where all sorts of new realities are possible to imagine. It’s no accident that Hollywood came to be known as the “dream factory.” Like dreams, where temporal and spatial boundaries are nonexistent and one’s mind floats in and out of the past, future, and present, so too in the cinema. By the time Freud began articulating his theory about the importance of dreams and the workings of one’s unconscious, his ideas didn’t seem so far to a generation that had already spent countless hours viewing movies and reprogramming their brains to think in dreamlike ways.

James Joyce played with time and space and multiple perspectives in his literary works, with similar effect to what Cezanne, Picasso, and the Cubists were able to do on canvas. In Ulysses, Joyce’s protagonist, Bloom, jumps in and out of a dizzying array of places, times, and realities as his mind wanders through the universe over galaxies far away and the tiniest realm of the molecule the course of a very average day in Dublin. With Joyce we are introduced, for the first time, to stream of consciousness, the kind we all experience every waking and sleeping moment, as our own minds wander off into different time dimensions and distant spaces, of which we are not always in control. What Joyce is suggesting is that every individual is experiencing multiple perspectives and realities and occupying different places and times in his own mind throughout the day, just like Bloom. Our minds simply won’t let us settle on a single perspective or, for that matter, allow us to accommodate a seamless objective reality. Edmund Wilson caught the brilliance of Joyce’s accomplishment when he wrote:

Joyce is indeed really the great poet of a new phase of of human consciousness. Like Proust’s or Whitehead’s or Einstein’s world, Joyce’s world is always changing as it is perceived by different observers and by them at different times.

Although like the Romantics Joyce believed that consciousness is an embodied experience, and that the expression of love and compassion is a natural predisposition, his view of human vulnerability amid imperfection differs in an important respect. While Romantics like Whitman celebrate human vulnerability and pay homage to the importance of erotic sexuality as a way of getting in touch with one’s natural vitality, there is a tendency to romanticize human potential by creating an ideal transcendent self that no one can ever hope to live up to.

Joyce’s protagonists remind us far more of ourselves, it’s not that Leopold and Molly aren’t desirous of ascent. But, as Martha Nussbaum reminds us, life keeps interrupting in all of its unanticipated twists and turns. Life is messy, chaotic, and full of banality, some of it rising to comic levels of hysteria rather than cosmic levels of transcendence. We all soldier on—but in the midst of our desire for transcendence, we need to take time out for a stool or relieve our stress with five minutes of masturbation. In the real world, our lives are lived out like the puck of a yo-yo. We’re up--we’re down. We have moments of brilliant insight and moments of stupefying despair.

What Joyce and Nussbaum understand is that the ordinariness of our individual lives--with all of its imperfections and neediness--that we find our common humanity and the emotional wherewithal to empathize with others. By putting too much emphasis on transcendence, the Romantics risked leaving the subtle impression that the imperfections of human beings are intolerable, even disgusting Joyce put it best when he wrote, “Life we must accept as we see it before our eyes, men and women as we meet them in the real world, not as we apprehend them in the world of faery.”

When we emphatize with each other, we are acknowledging each other’s day-to-day struggle to be and celebrating each other’s desire to succeed and transcend ourselves. But more than that—we recognize in others’ struggles that they are human beings, like us, who are trying to ascend to new heights, even as they wrestle with imperfections, flaws, and demons that weigh them down. We don’t judge them for their weaknesses but, rather, extend our generosity. We know that it’s difficult overcoming all of the obstacles put in the way of our becoming what we’d like to be. Joyce’s characters are like the rest of us, real people, full of contradictions, allowing readers to empathize with them, without being maudlin.

It seems as if the entire period from 1882 to World War I was but a dress rehearsal for Freud’s entrance onto the world stage and the official raising of the curtain on the Age of Psychological Consciousness. Kern points out that in architecture, the stuffy Victorian sensibility, with its emphasis on walled-off, closed spaces tucked away from the outside world, gave way to the new architecture of openness and transparency. The new skyscrapers, the first to use steel girders, eliminated supporting walls. Glass was used to open up interiors and create the sense of boundless space between inside and outside. Whereas Victorian architecture accentuated the bourgeoisie’s sense of privacy, featuring buildings with so many nooks and crannies that one needed a detailed map not to get lost in the maze, the new architecture knocked down walls, opened up spaces to daylight, and even exposed internal structures, which traditionally were concealed with facades.

Frank Lloyd Wright best expressed the new sensibility, explaining that his architecture was designed with the goal of creating a seamless integration of the interior and exterior worlds he called “the inside” becoming “outside”.
In this snippet of time—less than a third of a century—human consciousness was irrevocably altered. The new technologies and modes of perception broke through barriers that had long separated people, partially leveling traditional social hierarchies while democratizing access to and control over time and space. The telephone, cinema, radio, the motor car, and other twentieth technologies gave the average man and woman the same access to speed, mobility, and different spatial realities as the well-to-do. Moreover, the new technologies also brought people into increasingly close proximity, exposed them to an increasing range of others, and fostered a range of relationships that could never have occurred before.

The leveling of social hierarchies, the introduction of multiperspectivism, the democratization of human experience, and the increasing exposure to diverse others laid the way for the great empathic surge that would flare up momentarily in the Roaring Twenties—with the flappers—and blow up into a full-bodied social phenomenon that would define a generation in the 1960’s.

- Jeremy Rifkin

art and advertising

Art can be any object that has been reclassified and reinterpreted so that they have been imbued with additional value besides usefulness.

A BMW is not just a car. It is a driving experience. It is intelligence. It is status.

A diamond is not just a stone. It is a signal and commitment of one's love.

Human values are commodified into objects, and then bought and sold on a market. Advertising is the process in which this commodification occurs.

Advertisers are artists.

appropriate and remix

Elaine Sturtevant, an American artist born in 1930 in Lakewood, OH, has achieved recognition for works that consist entirely of copies of other artists’ works. Warhol, Stella, Gonzalez-Torres, etc. In each case, her decision to start copying an artist happened well before the artist achieved wide recognition. Nearly all of the artists she has chosen to copy are now considered major artists.

A literary equivalent would be along the lines of "creative translation" such as Ezra Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius, in which Pound picked through the elegies of Propertius, translated them, cut them up, and reassembled them in a fashion he deemed entertaining and relevant. Examples from other forms: Thelonius Monk Plays Duke Ellington, in which Monk takes great liberties with Ellington’s songbook. Lichtenstein’s appropriation of comic book art. Picasso’s use of newsprint, among other media, in, say, Composition with Fruit, Guitar, and Glass. Paul’s Boutique: The Beastie Boys, Dust Brothers, and Mario Caldato, Jr., sample from more than 100 sources, including Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, James Brown, and Sly & the Family Stone. Steve Reich’s "Different Trains," which incorporates audio recordings about train travel by Holocaust survivors and a Pullmanporter. Musique concrete instance, John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4," written for 12 radios, each played by 2 people (one to tune the channel and one to control volume and timbre). A conductor controls the tempo; the audience hears whatever is on the radio in that city on that day. Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Offertium,” which mutates themes from Bach’s “Musical Offering” until they’re beyond recognition. In “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major” by Johann Pachelbel, Brian Eno bends and twists Pachelbel.

In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the “real thing”): theft without apology self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.

Graffiti artists use the stuff of everyday life as their canvas walls, dumpsters, buses. A stylized representation is placed on an everyday object. In visual art, as in other media, artists take unfiltered pieces of their surroundings and use them for their own means.

duchamp

You don't make art, you find it.

"realism" = perception

In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf describes the dilemma of Charles Steele, who’s painting a still-life portrait: a cloud drifts into view, Mrs. Flanders’s sons run around the beach, she grows upset about the letter she’s writing, and she won’t stop moving. If Charles instructs Mrs. Flanders to stop moving, he’s altering the world in order for it to match what he wants to paint, rather than shaping his painting to reflect what’s actually occurring in the world.

There’s no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.

There is properly no history, no biography.

the appeal of reality shows

We want our art to be life-like, but somehow also, larger than life.

In 2008, more votes were cast for American Idol than for Barack Obama for president: 97 million for American Idol and, on Election Day, 70 million for Obama.

I try not to watch reality TV, but it happens anyway. My aunt and uncle, both of whom are pretty intellectual, live two doors down from me and watch reality TV, so I watch it with them sometimes. My wife (another vety intelligent person) watches America’s Next Top Model, so I’m all too familiar with that show as well. I think different people get sucked into reality shows for different reasons. My aunt and uncle seem to like the competition aspect. It becomes a blurry vision of televised sports (which also has that added sense of immediacy because it’s unfiltered, is "really" happening, and therefore there’s the feeling that in the next minute anything can happen adds to the excitement of a competition). My wife seems to like America’s Next Top Model for the elements you would find in a soap opera: the intrigue and fighting among the contestants. The producers have a way of typecasting and highlighting aspects of each girl’s personality for greater effect (nearly everyone wants to see beautiful young women gossip and argue). There’s also always at least one minor subplot. However scripted the show is, it’s more compellingthan standard soap operas. I like to see how reality shows are put together, especially the way in which the shows are a hybrid mutant of documentaries, game shows, and soaps. The producers have no problem blurring the lines between these three types of shows: they take what works and discard the rest.

My big-picture philosophy is that with shows like this, I don’t think our viewers necessarily differentiate between what’s scripted and what’s not. Our primary goal is to make a show that’s compelling.

Readers thirst for a narrative, any narrative, and will turn to the most compelling one.

Bored with the airbrushed perfection of Friends, we want to watch real people stuck on tropical islands without dental floss. We want our viewing to reflect our complicated, messy, difficult, overloaded, overstimulated lives. Let’s see messy houses getting clean, bratty children caught on hidden cameras, actual arguments between genuine young people being authentically solipsistic.

The bachelorette on the brink of true love with one of several men she has known for seven hours; the cad who manipulates his beloved on cue narratives: false actualization and authentic shame. The success of the genre reflects our lust for emotional meaning.We really do want to feel, even if that means indulging in someone else’s joy or woe. We have a thirst for reality (other people’s reality, edited) even as we suffer a surfeit of reality (our own--boring/painful).

Forms serve the culture; when they die, they die for a good reason: they’re no longer embodying what it’s like to be alive. If reality TV manages to convey something that a more manifestly scripted and plotted show doesn’t, that’s less an affront to writers than a challenge.

copyright quotes

Genius borrows nobly (Emerson)

Good poets borrow; great poets steal (Picasso)

Art is theft (Picasso)

What's appropriation art?

It's when you steal but make a point of stealing, because by changing the context, you change the connotation.

photography

the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

narrative-->modernism-->reality show

Reality is messy, it doesn't fit a neat, compelling narrative. As art gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more true to reality, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art, underprocessed, underproduced, splinters and explodes. An unfiltered documentary is fragmented, its meaning and purpose ambigious, ambivalent.

In contrast, memoir is constructed, because it's based on memory. Narrative is like memory. It is unreliable, constructed to create a certain effect.

How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? Many memoirs make a virtue of seeming unadorned, unvarnished, but the first and most unforgettable thing we learn about memory is that it's fallible. Memories, we now know, can be buried, lost, blocked, repressed, even recovered. We remember what suits us, and there's almost no limit to what we can forget. Only those who keep faithful diaries will know what they were doing at this time, on this day, a year ago. The rest of us recall only the most intense moments, and even these tend to have been mythologized by repetition into well-wrought chapters in the story of our lives. To this extent, memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator.

Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction; an attempt to close in on its twin sister, the reality-show.

People in the 19th century started to get sick of narrative with all of its refined literary and plot devices. Modernism was the shift back to simplicity, a turn back toward messy, hard to understand, fragmented reality.

Modernism ran its course, emptying out narrative. Novels became all voice, anchored neither in plot nor circumstance, driving the storytelling impulse underground.

Abstract expressionism in art was a similar attempt to recapture reality through its technique of spontaneous creation on the canvas. Rejected at first, it was accepted by the Establishment in the mid-20th century. Pollack and Rothko are now considered artistic geniuses because they forced artists to rethink the role and purpose of painting.

Then people got sick of abstract, difficult documentary-art. A longing for narration, story, archetype rose up again. But we didn't go right back to poetry with rhyme, novels with plot, art with representation, music with melody and harmony...we got jazz, the reality-show, the memoir, the remix, a hybrid of real and fake, the authentic fake. It had both the spontaneity of life (reality) with the order and appeal of narration and myth.

Morality, Truth, Beauty

Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.

- Katha Upanishad

The word religion comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies the re-establishment of a connection which has been lost.

The primary purpose of myths is to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.

Compared with the majesty of God which has created every last minute detail of the universe, man knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow connected with his existence, gives man a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, ‘the One’.

Man used to be an animal, part of nature, life completely dictated by instinct.

Then man opened up Pandora’s Box, ate the Apple, was awoken and became aware, conscious. Instinct no longer dictated man’s life. Ego ruled.

With freedom and consciousness, man was free from nature’s bound, and soon fell prey to envy, greed, lust, hatred, cruelty, depression, loneliness, sin.

Now humans live in lives of constant tension. At the deepest level, there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves.

But to do this they have to make a constant, conscious efforts. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.

...The need to resolve this psychic split gives rise to other distinctive features of human behaviour for which the animal kingdom offers no real parallels. One conspicuous means whereby human beings sublimate their tendency to egocentricity is through their love of games and sport. Not only does the rivalry between teams and individuals provide a socially acceptable channel for competitive impulses which might otherwise become socially disruptive. By disciplining physical or mental activity within a strict framework of rules, the participants in a game or sport become subordinated to something higher than themselves. A psychological model for all sporting activity is the spiritual discipline of Zen archery, in which the archer's purpose is so to eliminate the distortions arising from his own ego that the arrow naturally flies to its target. Whenever a game is played well it produces those moments when body and mind come into such instinctive co-ordination that the players seem to have been lifted above themselves. This was why, until it became corrupted, the original Olympic Games were one of the central religious ceremonies of the ancient Greek world. The skill of the competitors expressed an ideal of perfection which elevated not only the athletes themselves but all those who watched them. Something of the same sense of transcendence, although it is similarly open to corruption by the ego, accounts for the extraordinary glamour which surrounds sport in our modern world.

An even more significant instance of how human beings express this urge to transcend the limitations of their ego-existence is through every kind of artistic expression. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order. From music to painting, from architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution. Any work of art thus seeks to create a marriage between those complementary aspects of the psyche we see as masculine and feminine. Analyse the appeal of a Beethoven symphony and we see how it is made up of that familiar fourfold combination of strength and mind, heart and soul. The music commands our attention by its masculine power. It appeals to our intellect by the formal subtleties of its structure. It moves us by its feminine grace and delicacy, its flowing life, its appeal to our feelings. It elevates us by evoking something beyond ourselves, a sense of perfect totality. Like all great art it thus harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.

Any work of art can be analysed along similar lines, even if only in terms of how it may fall short of such perfect balance. Whenever we sense any artistic creation to be in some way deficient, this is either because it somehow lacks life or because it is inadequately organised, or both. Any work of art which succeeds, however, can make us feel mysteriously more alive, by connecting us with the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego. Such is what the artistic impulse in mankind is all about. But no device for re-establishing that sense of unity with our inner life is more ingenious than one coded into us by the process of evolution itself: to conjure up inside our heads those patterns of imaginary events we call stories.

- Christopher Booker

islamic art

Hegel considered the sublime to be a marker of cultural difference and a characteristic feature of oriental art. His teleological view of history meant that he considered 'oriental' cultures as less 'developed', more autocratic in terms of their political structures and more fearful of divine law. According to his reasoning, this meant that oriental artists were more inclined towards the aesthetic and the sublime: they could engage god only through 'sublated' means. He believed that the excess of intricate detail that is characteristic of Chinese art, or the dazzling metrical patterns characteristic of Islamic art, were typical examples of the sublime and argued that the disembodiment and formlessness of these art forms inspired the viewer with an overwhelming aesthetic sense of awe.

definition of sublime

In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation.

For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).

Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).

Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).

Sublime – Turbulent Nature (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).

Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).

Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).

sport as art