Category — Aesthetics

That which we find words for is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Nowadays, one cannot write like Shakespeare. There is no reason why one cannot write as well as Shakespeare (with immense luck and super-Herculean effort), but to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s would be considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In itself, there is nothing odd in this, for the least we expect of artists is that they create something new. [Read more →]

The above might be a rather grand title; but then, it is a rather grand subject. In our post-Enlightenment age, there is no area to which we will not bring the blunt hammer—or fine scalpel, however you view it—of science. There is perhaps a certain contingent which will not accept this. Certainly, that’s true of religious fundamentalists, but it’s also true of certain literary figures, who consider a scientific understanding of literature hardly an understanding at all, and only hopelessly and meaninglessly reductive. It’s probably true that it is reductive to think of art as serving a specific evolutionary purpose, or to analyse a musical phrase in terms of its frequencies and the resulting brain-wave reactions. But that is not to say that nothing can be gained from such a reduction. Indeed, it may be true that more can be gained from it, even while accepting that literary criticism, in the classical sense, and a scientific analysis of literature, are, as Stephen Jay Gould might put it, non-overlapping magisteria. [Read more →]

I finished reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence yesterday, and am not quite sure what to make of it. Partly, this is because most of my reading sessions were begun at two in the morning and ended at two fifteen, and so I couldn’t absorb anything other than the most striking of points. But quite apart from that, even if I had read it all while fully awake, I’m quite certain that much of it would have passed me by. This is partly Bloom’s fault and partly mine. It is Bloom’s fault in that he seems to insist, in his writing, on making bold assertions of fact without the kind of backing up that would be accepted anywhere other than in the world of literary criticism. And it is my fault in that I find this style of writing hard to just accept and get on with. [Read more →]

Diplomatic relations between the camps of Waldemar Januszczak and Roger Scruton are especially hostile. The BBC’s Modern Beauty season has recently been the stage for a pitched battle between the two, and the debate has spilled over into other mediums, too. Each presents his own views on beauty and art in an impassioned way, occasionally descending into ad hominem, and naturally coming no closer to a resolution on the matter at hand. [Read more →]

Can art ever be truly timeless? It’s an almost universally accepted idea we have of great art that if it is truly great, it will “stand the test of time”. What does that mean, exactly? Simply that it still appears just as fresh, insightful and powerful as it did when it was first created. The point we can infer from that is that these great works of art are not slaves to fashion, but strike somewhere near the heart of human nature, which is unchanging over thousands of years—a fact which we know primarily from the classics. When we read an old play that is a relic more than it is a classic, that is usually because the artist was so seduced by some particular artistic fashion that was sweeping his part of the world at the time, that he forsook a true depiction of human nature in its favour. That seduction must be strong, because proportionally speaking, the amount of classics the world has produced is close to nil. [Read more →]