(the following are the final passages from my last post -- apparently they got
cropped off during transmission)
............................................................
Possiblly, Bell was following the thoughts of the widely read music critic,
Eduard Haslick, who wrote:
"What kind of beauty is the beauty of a musical composition? It is a
specifically musical kind of beauty. By this we understand a beauty that is
self-contained and in no need
of content from outside itself, that consists simply and solely of forms and
their artistic combination"
And then "perversely", as Kivy, puts it, Bell and Fry offered the formalism of
this "absolute music" as the model for the visual and literary arts. (and
apparently Fry even wrote a piece of
gibberish that sounded like Milton's "Ode on the Nativity" as an example -
though he kept it private, perhaps knowing that it would be the object of
ridicule)
By the end of the chapter, Kivy is ready to move on to more recent examples
of "wrong models" ("the theme of this monograph") - though I
would question whether any kind of models at all can be useful in the study
of aesthetics.
As he has shown us, not much progress has been made towards defining a "meme
principe" for the beaux arts -- but at least the writers who have addressed
the question are critics and sometimes even practitioners of the arts, rather
than secular protestant philosphers.
And I think that's an improvement, because whatever nonsense they're writing,
at least they can offer specific examples with which we can all become
familiar.
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