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from philistinism
  • What interests me about the idea is that it seems to be definitionally about having the wrong sort of goals. Under the high-culture theory, Art, thinking, the mind are sacred and supposed to be treated reverentially; capitalist production of culture-slop is a desecration. Arteests have high intellectual, spiritual, artistic goals, philistines want to be entertained. JF Martel's book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice makes this case; that art is about pursuing high goals and is threatened by the low goals of commerce and entertainment.

Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice

01 Jun 2024 - 06 Nov 2026
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    • Notes

      • Intro by Donna Tart. Didn't realize the Art/Artifice thing goes back to Joyce in Portrait.
        • Ask Claude
          • The Art/Artifice distinction in Martel's book is sourced directly from Joyce's aesthetic theory in Portrait. Here's the brief version:
          • In Portrait, Joyce calls artifice "improper art" and defines it as art that presents its content so as to induce a state of attraction or repulsion in the viewer.
          • Artifice divides into two kinds, again after Joyce: pornography — artifice meant to entice the viewer in a particular direction — and propaganda — artifice meant to induce revulsion.
          • What Joyce calls "proper art," on the other hand, uses the aesthetic to reveal things in their original, preconceptual "suchness" — it doesn't reduce its content to some instrumental end.
          • True art is static — both demanding calm and creating a calm microclimate of its own, a still space where, as Joyce says, "the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing."
          • Artifice, by contrast, orients us toward what is flashy and shallow — toward movement, and more specifically toward the predetermined path where it wants us to move.
          • A key factor distinguishing art from artifice is that a work of art has an unconscious — unlike artifice, it cannot be boiled down to its influences and component parts without falsifying it; its depths are nonlinear, self-renewing, and inexhaustible, always with something new to say, often things the artist could never have consciously intended.
          • So Tartt's intro and Martel's whole book title are essentially a riff on Joyce's vocabulary — "age of artifice" meaning an era where the manipulative, instrumentalized pseudo-art has crowded out the real thing.
      • the very first sentence:
      • Art is the name we have given to humanity’s most primal response to the mystery of existence. It was in the face of the mystery that dance, music, poetry, and painting were born.
      • art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms.
      • This exaltation of art makes me want to go all Henry Carr. It's elevating it into something sacred and religious, and I'm sort of down on all that, attitudinally. Trying to be less so.
      • Art breaks down the barriers that normally stand between the physical and the psychic
      • Ah OK this means AI and computationalism is a competitor; it breaks down those barriers in a different way, or aims to.
      • I guess my problem with this book is this: OK, art is great, important to human life. That's not a very original observation. Nor is it news that there is a lot of crap (aka artifice) pretending to be art and displacing it. All else being equal, yay art. What is this book telling me that is new?
      • Samuel Coleridge described the imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception." (in Biographia Literaria (1817))
      • Human consciousness has access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy. I will refer to it in this book as the “imaginal,” the name Henry Corbin gave to the intermediate realm, central to the cosmology of the Sufi mystics, between the rational mind of Man and the inscrutable mind of God.
      • Something in me resists (a bit) the idea of the imaginal as a realm, a space analogous to phys space that you can explore. I mean, I suppose it is a good metaphor but it is at best only a metaphor.
      • Didacticism exists in the “high arts” as well. Conceptualism, to cite just one example, is art that gives the concept—that is, the intellectual idea—primacy over the affect. While it can produce works that make important political points, often in clever and ingenious ways (think of Banksy or the early Damien Hirst), it seems to achieve the aesthetic emotion that Joyce ascribes to proper art only in very rare cases. That is, it tends not to astound us with the ineradicable mysteriousness of things (in fact, many conceptual pieces come with a written explanation that spells out the meaning of the work).
        • He's down on conceptual art, I guess unsurprisingly. A bit midwit? My own first and only artwork The Ultimate Lesson is conceptual, but not particularly moralistic, didactic, or political.
      • Ch 3 gets into Kant which is where I get off the train. JF is not a Kantian:
      • The role of the artist isn’t to manufacture illusions of meaning in a meaningless world (as a Kantian might insist) but on the contrary to excavate the real meaningfulness that lies hidden from the egoic mind—and to do this even if the meanings uncovered aren’t things we can humanly understand...For Kant and modern rationalism, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. For Aquinas, Joyce, and Wilde, it is the other way around: beauty exists as a fundamental reality that we, as beholders, can come to witness as something larger than us.
      • Modern art mutated the idea of beauty in a good (radical) way.