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offer balm for the spirit, but it is not a religious balm. Exactly what sort of
balm is it? Therein lies a tale . . .
Aesthetic Judgment and Beauty
Tantalizing is not a word most people associate with the work of Immanuel
Kant. But the first half of his Critique of Judgement, which deals with the nature
of aesthetic judgment, is full of tantalizing observations about the nature of
THE VOCATION OF ART 181
aesthetic experience. Kant saw that the appeal of aesthetic experience was
strikingly different from the appeal of sensory pleasure, on the one hand,
and the satisfaction we take in the good, moral, or practical, on the other.
For one thing, with both sensory pleasure and the good, our satisfac-
tion is inextricably bound up with interest, which is to say with the exist-
ence of whatever it is that is causing the pleasure. When we are hungry, a
virtual dinner will not do: we want the meat and potatoes. It is the same
with the good: a virtual morality is not moral.
Things are different with aesthetic pleasure. There is something pecu-
liarly disengaged about aesthetic pleasure. When it comes to our moral and
sensory life, we are constantly reminded that we are creatures of lack: we
are hungry and wish to eat, we see the good and know that we fall short.
But when we judge something to be beautiful, Kant says, the pleasure we
take in that judgment is ideally an entirely disinterested satisfaction. 3
The great oddity about aesthetic judgment is that it provides satisfaction
without the penalty exacted by desire. This accounts both for its power and
for its limitation. The power comes from the feeling of wholeness and
integrity that a disinterested satisfaction involves. Pleasure without desire is
pleasure unburdened by lack. The limitation comes from the fact that, unbur-
dened by lack, aesthetic pleasure is also unmoored from reality. Precisely
because it is disinterested, there is something deeply subjective about aes-
thetic pleasure: what we enjoy is not an object but our state of mind. Kant
spoke in this context of the free play of the imagination and the under-
standing it is free because it is unconstrained by interest or desire.4
It is a curious fact that in his reflections on the nature of aesthetic judg-
ment Kant is only incidentally interested in art. The examples of pure
beauty he provides are notoriously trivial: sea shells, wallpaper, musical
fantasies, architectural ornamentation. But Kant was not attempting to pro-
vide lessons in art appreciation. He was attempting to explain the mechan-
ics of taste. It is not surprising that the Critique of Judgement became an
important theoretical document for those interested in abstract art: in Kant s
view, the purest beauty was also the most formal, the most abstract.
There is, however, another side to Kant s discussion of beauty. This has
to do with the moral dimension of aesthetic judgment. If the pleasure we
take in the beautiful is subjective, Kant argued, it is nonetheless not sub-
jective in the same way that sensory pleasure is subjective. You like your
182 RELIGION AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE
steak well done, I like mine rare: that is a mere subjective preference. But
when it comes to the beautiful, Kant observes, we expect broad agreement.
And this is because we have faith that the operation of taste that free play
of the imagination and understanding provides a common ground of
judgment. We cannot prove that a given object is beautiful, because the point
at issue is not the object but the state of mind it occasions. Nevertheless,
Kant says, We woo the agreement of everyone else, because we have for it
a ground that is common to all. 5 Which is to say that if judgments about
the beautiful are in one sense subjective, in another sense they are universal
because they exhibit our common humanity. The feeling of freedom and
wholeness that aesthetic experience imparts is thus not merely private but
reminds us of our vocation as moral beings. In this context, Kant famously
spoke of beauty as being the symbol of morality because in aesthetic pleas-
ure the mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation. 6
Art without Beauty
But wait a moment: Ennoblement ? Elevation ? What are we talking about
here? It is worth pausing to consider the tremendous irony that attends our
culture s continuing investment in art emotional, financial, and social
investment given the oppositional and transgressive character of much of
the contemporary art world. We continue to behave as if art were something
special, something important, something spiritually refreshing. But when we
canvas the roster of name artists today, what do we find?
Well, doubtless we find a great many things. But it is striking how much
of what we find exists in the febrile bubble of cutting-edge notoriety. It is
a curious situation. Traditionally, the goal or end of fine art was to make
beautiful objects. Beauty itself came with a lot of Platonic and Christian
metaphysical baggage, some of it indifferent or even, nota bene, positively
hostile to art. But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in
terms, at least a description of failed art. How different things are today!
But if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the traditional link
between art and beauty, they have done nothing to disown the social pre-
rogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anes-
thesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something art
THE VOCATION OF ART 183
we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism as if
being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point.
George Orwell gave classic expression to this point in Benefit of Clergy:
Some Notes on Salvador Dalí. Acknowledging the deficiency of the philis-
tine response to Dalí s work categorical rejection along with denial that
Dalí possessed any talent whatever Orwell goes on to note that the
response of the cultural elites was just as impoverished. Essentially, the elite
response to Dalí was the response of l art pour l art, of extreme aestheticism.
The artist, Orwell writes,
is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary
people. Just pronounce the magic word Art, and everything is
O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.;
kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L Age d Or
[which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman
defecating] is O.K.7
A juror in the obscenity trial in Cincinnati over Robert Mapplethorpe s
notorious photographs of the S&M homosexual underworld memorably
summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that
he did not like Mapplethorpe s rebarbative photographs, the juror nonethe-
less concluded that if people say it s art, then I have to go along with it. 8
If people say it s art, then I have to go along with it. It is worth paus-
ing to digest that comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question:
Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they have
to go along with it, no matter how offensive it might be? Part of the answer [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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