tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4222475879097604897.post6742443345567739432..comments2023-10-31T10:21:00.796-04:00Comments on Thanks for the Use of the Hall: On Realism, Beauty, and "Exposure Crisis"Dan Sallitthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13136066978329749513noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4222475879097604897.post-79276014457153162832009-03-09T15:08:00.000-04:002009-03-09T15:08:00.000-04:00Sorry to keep commenting on my own thread, but thi...Sorry to keep commenting on my own thread, but this beauty/sublime opposition has made me think of one more thing. In my post, I continually used words like "alive" or "revivify" to describe the effect of realism on what I was calling beauty: "...ditto countless other attempts to make the image seem alive again." And yet, Edmund Burke's idea of the sublime seems to stand in the same relation to beauty as death does to life. Here's Wikipedia again on Burke's <I>A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful</I>: "The formal cause of beauty is the passion of love; the material cause concerns aspects of certain objects such as smallness, smoothness, delicacy, etc.; the efficient cause is the calming of our nerves; the final cause is God's providence...The sublime also has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty. Its formal cause is thus the passion of fear (especially the fear of death); the material cause is equally aspects of certain objects such as vastness, infinity, magnificence, etc.; its efficient cause is the tension of our nerves; the final cause is God having created and battled Satan, as expressed in Milton's great epic 'Paradise Lost.'"<BR/><BR/>So the aesthetic appeal generated by realism is akin to the attraction of death? This makes me think of Norman Mailer's essay "The Metaphysics of the Belly," published in <I>The Presidential Papers</I>, which contains an attempt to explain the appeal of the "scatology" of modern art: "...the modern condition may be psychically so bleak, so overextended, so artificial, so plastic - plastic like styrene - that studies of loneliness, silence, corruption, scatology, abortion, monstrosity, decadence, orgy, and death can give life, can give a sentiment of beauty."Dan Sallitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13136066978329749513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4222475879097604897.post-84683617525085049582009-03-05T14:34:00.000-05:002009-03-05T14:34:00.000-05:00One further thought on this interesting Burkian di...One further thought on this interesting Burkian division of good art vibes into "beauty" and "the sublime." Adopting that framework in a tentative way, I tried to think about it in terms of the back-and-forth flow that I was describing between beauty and realism. Let's call it "good art vibes" and realism to avoid confusion.<BR/><BR/>In the one direction, from good art vibes to realism, it seems to me that any good art vibe will do, whether beauty or the sublime. Even the most perfectly proportioned object, replaced with something less perfect, will yield a form of realism: you make Ernest Borgnine a romantic lead, and it's instant realism.<BR/><BR/>But, in the other direction, from realism to good art vibes, the outcome must be the sublime, almost by definition.<BR/><BR/>So we have described an entropic system where all the beauty in the world slowly gets replaced by the sublime in the catalog of good art vibes! No wonder these old ways of talking about beauty seem quaint to us.Dan Sallitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13136066978329749513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4222475879097604897.post-40769304576474781802009-03-04T18:01:00.000-05:002009-03-04T18:01:00.000-05:00Interesting. I was going to say that the kind of ...Interesting. I was going to say that the kind of beauty that I was talking about, the kind that results from realism "feeding back" and giving pleasure, doesn't seem very unmeasureable or incomprehensible: most of my examples are of fairly simple phenomena. Then I looked at <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)" REL="nofollow">the Wikipedia article about the sublime</A>, and ran across this apropos passage about Edmund Burke's thoughts:<BR/><BR/>"Beauty may be accentuated by light, but either intense light or darkness (the absence of light) is sublime to the degree that it can obliterate the sight of an object. The imagination is moved to awe and instilled with a degree of horror by what is 'dark, uncertain, and confused.' While the relationship of the sublime and the beautiful is one of mutual exclusiveness, either one can produce pleasure. The sublime may inspire horror, but one receives pleasure in knowing that the perception is a fiction.<BR/><BR/>"Burke's concept of the sublime was an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience described by Plato in several of his dialogues (Philebus, Ion, Hippias Major, and Symposium) and suggested ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience."<BR/><BR/>This passage really goes well with the reactions I was describing! Here the sublime seems to substitute for what I called beauty. <BR/><BR/>The next section in the Wikipedia article is about Kant's view of the sublime, which seems to underlie the ideas you put forth.Dan Sallitthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13136066978329749513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4222475879097604897.post-56121515666599860222009-03-04T17:24:00.000-05:002009-03-04T17:24:00.000-05:00The traditional opposition, from the 18th century,...The traditional opposition, from the 18th century, is of the beautiful to the sublime, the one measured, composed, and knowable, the other unmeasureable and lying beyond comprehension, whether too large (the mathematical sublime) or too complex to be accepted as order. With music, Mozart insisted that only the beautiful could "still be music," although some of Don Giovanni and the Requiem seems to step outside that box, at least far enough to suggest the sublime.<BR/><BR/>What's interesting about all that in this context is that beauty then was tied to a sense of the everyday (everything in proportion) whereas we now think of beauty taking us away from the everyday, almost to something sublime in that older sense of the word. Hence the logic of your being able to oppose beauty and realism.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com