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By “feeling”, Vladimir Solovyov is not referring to subjective and personal impressions, but rather to the higher feeling centre, insofar as it is objective and leads to creation. Again, these feelings are manifested in the material, formal, and absolute levels.
Technical Arts
In material creation, the idea of beauty serves merely as an ornament in the context of utilitarian goals. Solovyov actually calls this “technical applied art”, and its highest representative is architecture. This hardly seems true in the modern world, where ugly architecture is the norm. Oddly enough, more effort is now put into making electronic gadgets aesthetic as well as functional. At this level, the expression of beauty is limited by the necessity to be functional and useful. Artisans and craftsmen are the representatives of this level.
Fine Art
Fine art is a kind of creation whose defining significance comes from the aesthetic form and is expressed in purely ideal images. Fine arts come in four forms, which are organized in an ascent from matter to spirit. The fine arts are distinguished from the technical arts by not having a utilitarian necessity.
- Sculpture
- Sculpture is the most material art, the one closest.
- Painting
- Painting is more ideal than sculpture since there is no imitation of the corporeal in it. Unlike sculpture, which is three dimensional, the images in a painting are depicted on a flat surface.
- Music
- Music possesses more of a spiritual quality, as it is no longer embodied in or on the material itself. Rather, it is embodied in the movement and life of its substance—sound.
- Poetry
- Poetry finds its expression in the spiritual element of the human word. This is why so much of the greatest spiritual literature is in the poetic form. Poetry, along with command, was the primary way of thinking in the primordial state.
Mysticism
Fine art still does not reach the ideal of Beauty in its totality, since the contents of a work of art are accidental. The content of Absolute Beauty must be definite, necessary, and eternal. This type of beauty is not manifested directly in the world, although objects and phenomena are reflections of it. Genuine and complete Beauty, therefore, is located in the superhuman and supernatural world.
Solovyov calls the creative relationship of feeling to the transcendental world Mysticism. Specifically, he means the direct spontaneous relationship of the Spirit to the transcendental world, and not the negative connotations this word carries. Solovyov lists three criteria for juxtaposing mysticism with technical arts:
- Both have feeling as their basis, rather than perception and active will
- Both rely on imagination or fantasy, rather than reflection and external activity
- Both presuppose a an ecstatic inspiration, rather than a calm consciousness
Mysticism, for Solovyov, who himself had direct mystical experiences, is far from the popular association with the vague, unclear, and incomprehensible. He explains:
The sphere of Mysticism possesses an absolute clarity by itself, and it alone can clarify everything else, precisely as a result of this its light is unbearable for weak and unprotected eyes, and it plunges them into absolute darkness.
The Degeneration of Beauty
Concerning the degeneration of art, Solovyov writes:
Contemporary Western art cannot capture the ideal content of life for the simple reason that it itself has lost it. In the sphere of creative work we see in the West the same alteration in the three supremacies. In the Middle Ages unfettered art does not exist; everything is subordinated to mysticism.
Since the Renaissance, as a result of the general weakening of religious principles, the fine art of form emerged, and art was restricted to the accidental and arbitrary. In the modern world, the technical arts prevail, which are utilitarian and practical. Art has become a trade and a business. What does it cost is the primary interest of the art collector.
Art for art’s sake, for the sake of beauty, no longer exists. In the attempt to transcend form, art has instead become formless. Paintings are random, music discordant, poetry meaningless. Sculpture, as the art of three dimensions is replaced with arbitrary collections of debris and detritus. In a forced effort to appear engaged and relevant, the contemporary artist can only shock the common man rather than raise his consciousness to the Ideal of Beauty. Those who are beyond being shocked are most in need of a raised consciousness, which is an invisible target for them.
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I wasn’t doing either, just commenting, apologies if nothing interesting was added (or taken away!)
I really don’t understand this comment, Charlotte, whether you’re disputing or expanding on a point. There is no intent to “argue” anything, rather simply to describe. Beauty as one of the three highest ideas manifests on three planes corresponding to the tripartite constitution of man: spirit, soul, body. So it is not the case that “beauty needs art”, but rather that it manifests as art on the formal level. Solovyov makes the point I believe you are trying to make, that art at the formal level, because it always has a specific and somewhat arbitrary subject matter, is not the fullest manifestation of beauty. That is reserved to mysticism.
We have been illustrating the relationship of the Absolute with the Infinite, which manifests in all the permutations of the world process. So, of course, Beauty does not exist in a vacuum, but it is helpful to analyze how the ideas do manifest in isolation. For all practical purposes that is how we typically experience the ideas … in isolation. The scientist denies the mystical, the mystic knows nothing about economics, and so on. Wisdom is knowledge of the whole and we are here trying to gain such knowledge.
Does beauty alone need art or, indeed, does beauty exist outside its connection with the other attributes of God? you could call God beautiful, but could you call beauty God? You could argue that a portrait of a very beautiful woman, or a sunset, for example, were works of art that have the sole purpose of capturing beauty, but they are bound to fall short of the perfect originals and are, therefore, essentially acts of praise/worship. Beauty doesn’t exist in a vacuum, for wherever you find beauty you will also find truth, power, wisdom, etc…
The experience music project building looks like a collapsed lung combined with a mangled artery.
Good and relevant text.
“Art for art’s sake, for the sake of beauty, no longer exists.”
If this (for the sake of beauty) is behind “art for art’s sake”, then I’m absolutely for it, but as I have understood, the (post-)moderners have twisted this concept to its opposite, when it has become to mean that art has become “a luxury item for idle parasites” together with being transformed into a meaning in itself in the form of ugly, pointless and abstract public scenery sculptures made of…junk and rubbish.