Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Mullin
All art is a matter of objective subjectivity. And Keats nailed beauty. It's silly to go into such long and tortured definitions of these things. "It's Academic".
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Well then Rick, it’s a silliness that has resulted in such secondary sillinesses as Chartres Cathedral, the Enneads of Plotinus, and the Florentine Renaissance. For non-European sillinessess how about Avicenna or al-Ghazzali, who based much of their thinking on Plotinus along with key passages from the Quran. All light years beyond Keats, who is great but fragmentary along with the time he lived in. Name me one artistic production of the present that approaches the beauty of
Alhambra. And yet a long, rich culture of discourse on the nature of beauty had a lot to do with the preparation that it took to create such a masterpiece.
I can see the sense in choosing not to talk about it, or in thinking that talking about it inhibits creative practice in the present. Writing a poem is a lot more fun. But to dismiss talking about it as a sterile academic exercise is to ignore the facts: vast edifices of artistic realization far beyond anything possible in our own time, inspired and sustained by the sort of talk you’re writing off as “silly.”
“Objective subjectivity,” and that’s that. If only the great aesthetic theorists of the past had known it was so simple. Jeesh.