[ENGL 450/560] Blog Post #1: The Marrapodian Aesthetic Manifesto
For one of my graduate courses this summer, I was tasked with writing an aesthetic manifesto. The only requirements were that it should be reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s (as featured in The Picture of Dorian Gray), and answer three questions:
What is the purpose of art?
Is art related to morality?
What follows includes a set of principles that answers these three questions and guides my artistic consideration and creation.
A work of art—visual, literary, musical, performative, etc.—is a) created and b) able to be considered by another. In creating, a creative both is and becomes; so too the considerate in considering. I am myself—become myself—when I consider or create art.
Being is not becoming—and vice versa. Art is both. Art marries being and becoming, making whole the trinity of past, present, and potential. Art being becomes; art becomes being. Nothing comes of nothing.
Art is, and becomes, lovely—good, true, and beautiful. Definitionally, it cannot be evil, ignorant/false, or ugly, for the intersection of those is indifference: the antithesis of love, and therefore of all that makes creation and consideration possible. (Art can contain representations of evil, ignorance, ugliness, indifference, inconsideration, etc., but the map is not the territory; procedurally, productively, and thus definitionally, art can depict but cannot be of indifference. Likewise, art can depict but cannot be of inconsideration, and is thus distinguished from the byproducts of thoughtlessness.)
As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Decay of Lying: “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.” Thus, as art must be and become lovely, and since “love is the ultimate antidote to the manifold adversity that besets the adventure of human being [that] facilitates flourishing,” art betters being and becoming.
While bettering being and becoming is the byproduct of art, what is its purpose? The general purpose of art is to bridge the gap between being and becoming. Personally, art is supposed to fill me and likeminded mine with love (love that we live in, for, and by, whether through creation or consideration).
What is beauty? In actuality, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (I too—as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science—"want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.") In abstraction, beauty is both the opposite of ugliness and one of love’s three necessary elements—alongside goodness and truth. Beauty tempers truth and enhances goodness, just as a) goodness ensures the utility and beneficence of truth and beauty and b) as truth reveals beauty and turns the path paved with good intentions away from hell and towards heaven.
Is art related to morality—right and wrong? Right and wrong for whom or what? When? Where? Why? How? Right and wrong are relative; the dynamic, meaningful context that is Derridean différance swirls so a given action is right one moment, wrong the next, and both, depending. Holding my breath is right for making this point, but wrong for sustaining consciousness. It is right underwater, above, not so much; right for calming nerves, but only briefly.
Beyond right and wrong, better and worse, good and evil, and all other binaries—seeming opposite in abstraction—is dynamic, meaningful context. Between these ostensible opposites lies actuality (like the edge of a coin lies between heads and tails), which contains the exceptions that prove, improve, or disprove abstract rules. Art accounts for all, and especially for the exceptions. Art can update, refine, and even dismantle moral frameworks. In this way, art is related to morality.
Moreover, the adventure of human being and becoming is beset by manifold adversity. My governing principle—consider and live in, for, and by love—frees the will from the strings of circumstance and base instinct. It facilitates flourishing. It enables my ability to endure, overcome, ameliorate, and even preclude adversity.
Artistic creation and consideration fills me with the love I live in, for, and by. Thus, art is related at least to my morality. From my governing principle to my broader philosophical system, whether I am creating it or considering it, art is essential. As either critic or artist, engagement with art aids my retaining a Nietzschean "why of life" which enables me to bear almost any how.
When I create or consider art, I do so in love, for love, and by love. I also keep the necessity of exceptional acknowledgement in the back of my mind. I consider love in a paradigmatic mode and divide it into acceptance and accountability, essence and activity, etc., in an attempt to better myself, others, and, insofar as art makes both being and becoming better, everything: past, present, and future.
Procedurally and productively, whether engaging with philosophy, literature, visual art, or any creative medium, I remain aimed by my governing principle: Consider and live in, for, and by love—goodness, truth, and beauty, simultaneously.