Beauty is Now an Extinct Star

The Myth of Democracy ^ | 1991 | Tage Lindbom

[Askel5]

More Lindbom: Unconditional Surrender to the Volonté Générale

[Husker24]

I read the first couple of paragraphs, what the hell is this supposed to be about?

[KC Burke]

..., what the hell is this supposed to be about?

The Unconstrained vision of mankind, that vision held by the rationalist, totalitarian democracy of the left and others views all as knowable. It claims we have an ability to "immanitize the transcendance" and grab a terrestrial heaven instead of participating in the grace of God.

[PUGACHEV]

He believes that we have been corrupted by abstract art.

[Askel5]

Oh my gosh ... have you ever read Maurice Blondel?

Maybe I'll just insert here what I was reading this evening so you realize how extraordinary it was to read your reply just now.

(I'm still mooning over Lindbom so he -- and this post -- were handy during a conversation about "modern art" earlier.)

I do love your clarity. Best regards to you and yours!

[Askel5]

I do love ENVY your clarity.

[Askel5]

Nod to Neocon. =)

[P.O.E.]

IMHO, it's the control-freak mentality - the M.O. is to drag you down or disorient you, so you are easier to control, instead of giving you hope and respite.

"Tis better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven", etc.

[KC Burke]

Oh my gosh ... have you ever read Maurice Blondel?

No, I haven't. But on any of your posts that are outside of my reading circle, I simply take the parts that seem to point the same directions as Sowell, Kirk and Hayek and then, between them, I can normally see the same truth. My comment, of course is a synthisis of how the three of them would have expressed it.

And, I guess, I better add an LOL for anyone who is generous enough to portray my posts as concise.

It was about 68 degrees here today....what happened to KC winters?

[A.J.Armitage]

In the ongoing musical revolution, the leap into a world without norms leads to electronic or industrially produced music, which lacks an essential element of traditional music: namely, the overtones.

I guess we're overthrowing Western Civilization.

[Romulus]

Speaking of the Aeneid and Ulysses, isn't it a nice irony that neither Virgil nor Joyce succeeded in improving on Homer?

Literature, art, and music have always served one or another ideology. One doesn't like to be perverse, but the course of western art was set when the canons of Byzantine iconography, dictated by a theological vocabulary, were abandoned in favor of perspective and the single vanishing point as affirmation that reality is describable and subject to natural law. Impressionism and cubism were the inevitable successors.

Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica are iconic perhaps, but only as curiosities: how many people look at either for pleasure or aesthetic hints about non-linear ways of looking at the world? Similarly, how many people listen to Arnold Schönberg or read Ulysses as anything other than a chore?

Here might be the place to confess that I've always found the Aeneid's self-conscious civic boosterism hard to swallow, especially compared to Homer's universality.

If modern "aesthetics" are barren, it's because they reflect a sterile, nihilistic worldview. Let Belloc have the last word: "Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it."

[Askel5]

... reality is describable and subject to natural law. Impressionism and cubism were the inevitable successors.

I don't understand.

You can't describe reality? Imagery subject to natural law led to cubism?

[Askel5]

Precious little left to overthrow.

Trust all is well with you.

[Nature Leseul]

Um.

Looks to me like another empty reiteration of the same tired old argument that the only choices open to Man are existence as a slave of the whims of gods or as a slave of his own subconscious nature as an animal.

With, of course, the obligatory unsupported claims that reason is equivalent to hedonism.

[TEXOKIE]

You might find this interesting! Near as I can tell, contains a discussion of the effects of modern physics, art and music on our culture. Didnt follow the physics part very well, but I concur with much of what is said about the music!

[Askel5]

With, of course, the obligatory unsupported claims that reason is equivalent to hedonism.

He said that?

Could you point that out for me so I'm certain of what you speak?

[xm177e2]

He believes that we have been corrupted by abstract art.

He believes that... as do the Randians, people who would fit more into his description of "Luciferians" than anyone else on Earth...

[amom]

Thanks for the heads up Tex.

[Romulus]

You can't describe reality?

Sure you can. But reality is complex, so most artists emphasise one aspect or another. Ask yourself whether a portrait painted by a master can't be capable of conveying more true information than a photograph. As yourself whether Askel's dense, allusive semiotics are not intended to convey a complex, interrelated view of things where a newspaper article would just fall short.

Perspective isn't draftsmanship; it's a systematic theory of how objects are to be represented. In the hands of its most extreme practitioners such as Ucello or Bernini,

what has begun as a tool for the plausible representation of reality becomes a theatrical abstraction, a self-regarding intellectual game in which reality becomes less interesting than the lovely theory that aproximates it with orthagonals and vanishing points. Because reality no longer exists for its own sake but as illustration of theory, whatever's not reducible to the theory become dispensible. The tail wags the dog.

With the exhaustion of the academic style, impressionism represents the next attempt to reduce the world to a manageable theory. In this case, it's a an optical theory of color and reflected light. Line and form recede as mere abstractions, and images are reduced to the composites of light reflected or refracted from and through varying substances. Seurat and Monet perhaps are the most doctrinaire practitioners, and reality becomes a matter of atmospheric conditions and the altitude of the sun.

Cubism probably represents the end of the line as far as figurative theory is concerned. It represents a return to physics, proposing that objects be seen as fractured, viewed simultaneously as multiple planes, including the interior, as though viewed from a universe of 4 spatial dimensions). (Have a look at Picasso's "Three Musicians")

or else as extended through multiple moments of time (Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" is a memorable example)

As a postscript, there's surrealism. Though it's heavily influenced by Freud, I don't think of surrealism as "theoretical" in the same sense as the above, since surrealism relies so heavily not on application of systematic theory as purely subjective vision. But all of the other movements mentioned, IMO, have in common the conviction that art's power to convey meaning relies on adherence to a rigid theory.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!