The Case Against Art
Entry posted by BCii
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More depressing philosophy. =D
Though art is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to rival nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons. “Moonlight is sculpture,” wrote Hawthorne; Shelley praised the “unpremeditated art” of the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more beautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes, flowers, etc., beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact, termed “the most perfect picture” nothing more than “warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge.”
Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to nature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, “One gives to one’s art what one has not been capable of giving to one’s own existence.” It is true for artist and audience alike; art [...] arises from unsatisfied desire.
[To quote] Nietzsche’s aphorism, “We have Art in order not to perish of Truth.” Its consolation explains the widespread preference for metaphor over a direct relationship to the genuine article. If pleasure were somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the antithesis of art. In dominated life freedom does not exist outside art, however, and so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is welcomed. “I create in order not to cry,” revealed Klee.
I've often found myself thinking along similar lines, how profoundly inadequate are our symbolic modes of expression, i.e. language and art, when compared to the naturally occurring, genuine, living article they attempt to define and represent.
The symbol ought not to be preferred over the true presence and direct experience of that which it represents, of which it is the merest shadow.
The map ought not to be mistaken for the path itself.
Art = artifice = artificial.
And such like thoughts.
You know, I feel there is something horribly sterile about all art. Some quality which I can only describe as "dead." And the best reason we have for loving art is the fact of the truths we are attempting to approach through it.
Now I'm left wondering if I can possibly alienate my readership more than I just did. 
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