On Jul 29, 2012, at 8:57 PM, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote:
> Read my essay. I argue that the word moral and its implications was dropped > after the early modernists talked about formalist theory, art for art's sake, > the significant form, etc. but their ideas were precisely the same as those > embedded in the Beaux-Arts Style. In that way, the supposed break between > Beaux-Arts and modernism was as much manufactured as it was true, maybe more > manufactured. The art of the two types looks different but was it truly > different in fundamental theory? Words like moral became taboo in serious art > talk. But to say the same thing with other words, like 'significant form' was > accepted, and still is. I believe that all forms of art are exercises in imposing a moral order on the exempla and models that Nature shows us. We humans declare this or that configuration in artistic works to be harmonious or unharmonious, pleasing or displeasing, etc., **based on*** their supposed effects on our human feelings and perceptions. We impute to the instances in Nature the ability to engender those feelings of pleasure or displeasure in us. We say, for example, that certain lines or colors, sounds or movements in Nature are tranquil or exited, and thereby instigate tranquil or excite states in us. We go further and say that certain relationships and proportions are similarly conducive to good or bad feelings (pleasing or displeasing proportions of a figure, of color combination, of chords or sounds and tempos in music, etc.). These become "canonical" terms, terms of judgment, and are applied in such a way to define and even guide others in the proper or approved modes of appreciating. Consider in painting the different schemes of color harmony: direct complementary opposites, split complements, near neighbors, etc. The result is that eventually, every combination of colors is declared to be a form of "color harmony"--harmonies, btw, that the artist and vieweer are subject to but Nature is not! Nature does what it damn well pleases. At the very end of Annouilh's Beckett, one character says of Beckett, "With him it's not morality, it's aesthetics." Those two practices are not very far apart. As I have said before, "Art moralizes nature; Nature demoralizes art." | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady www.michaelbradydesign.com/Blog/ | [email protected] www.twitter.com/typehuile | www.linkedin.com/in/typehuile | www.facebook.com/typehuile "Thinking Like a Designer" at https://www.createspace.com/3462255 or http://snipurl.com/z43se
