Aesthetics Week
Written by Hadley Bennett Posted in Uncategorized
Aesthetics is often neglected among the far-right for several reasons. First, it’s viewed as the exclusive domain of the left. Second, aesthetics is a difficult subject to broach. Few areas of study are neglected based on cliches. Art is one such area that remains under-appreciated because of simple dogma: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What room for aesthetics, then? Third, it simply is not seen as terribly important. What exactly does it do? What does it make? How do you quantify it? Even if we can quantify it, is aesthetic engineering of public spaces an acceptable practice in a decentralized, market-oriented arena?
This week is Aesthetics Week–a philosophical discussion of the role of beauty in civilization. Some pieces narrow in on not-yet-decimated art forms which manage to continue on in opposition to reigning progressive dogma. Ryan Landry’s piece, which airs in an hour, looks at ballet as a form of sublime art–definitively non-democratic. Haven Monahan attempts to drive at a biological basis for why some symmetry, rhythm, scale, and the color red are viewed as beautiful.
Those are the previews. Stay tuned for the rest.
There’s still room in the queue on Saturday and Sunday. If you’d like to get in on the discussion, please send in a submission.
Beauty is associated with truth and truth with beauty. For as the natural order was laid down by its creator. His mind fashioned a natural order and spectacular beauty which man gazed upon when he went out from the caves as hunter gatherers.
So in imitation of such marvelous works of beauty. Of complex fractal patterns and of various colours of beautiful wildernesses and mountains although such works are mere shadows of a substationally even more beautiful and higher order. Man sought in imitation of the divine sought to replicate or capture that beauty in his buildings. And successfully did so in the traditional society that he erected in europe, asia and the americas each with their own styles yet uniquely beautiful.
Yet now beauty has been treated with contempt and architects and painters no longer knew how to create beauty. Even luxury homes suffer from the deficit of beauty. The Right currently has the sword but the ancient samurai culture of old combined both crythathenum and sword. Let us do so as we imitate the divine genius and reflect the heavenly realm in our buildings and all the things we create.
The crythathenum describes art and the sword describes virility. It is unfortunate that virility(except in video games I reckon) is separated from art and art from virility. Hence the beauty of art is decadent and berefit of the vitality of masculinity and vrility resides in ugly vulgarity. But in civilized man so combinates the crythathenum and the sword. Of a tempered and strong man brimming with vitality and nobility.
Here is an example of traditional asian aesthetics:
There’s so much awful stuff that smart talented artists can flourish. My advice to young people would be to get a good grounding in traditional techniques and subject matter. Conversely, learn how to think for yourself and take chances. As ol’ Ezra said, Make it new. Another good quote was from Dali who said you can’t help being a “modern” artist no matter what you do. So, ignore the acres of verbiage spewed out by shamans and learn how to tell a story within the work itself using form and content.
Regarding aesthetics, beauty and the Right:
L’univers esthétique des Européens (Institut Iliade: Institut pour la longue mémoire européenne)
Everyone should check up on Post-Anathema regularly. Whoever selects the pieces for that, they do a really terrific job.
Chaos (The Creation), 1841, Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky in particular sticks in my mind as an inspiring piece.
You’re quite welcome. I realized today that I haven’t updated it in a while and put up a few more selections. Much more improvement is needed, but it’s getting closer to the ideal.
Has anybody written anything on Scruton? Maybe I could do something if it hasn’t been done.
As long as it doesn’t overlap with: http://www.henrydampier.com/tag/roger-scruton/ then I think it’d be a great idea.
I was thinking of writing something along the lines of beauty requiring manifestation (Scruton on architecture), being self justifying (Oscar Wilde), and how aesthetics in the abstract is nonsense (that Plato’s ideal beauty can never be to round off the first point).
I don’t think that would overlap.
Sounds good to me.
I’m surprised to read that aesthetics has been considered the domain of the left. It seems to me that, if tradition is associated with the right, the aesthetic sensibility must also be. To me, the principles of the right have always represented a celebration of health, beauty, virility, and all that an organic individual and society regard as of transcendent value. What beautiful thing has the left produced? The left is in its essential principles a dissolution of transcendence–a dissolution of all boundaries that allow for differentiation. The beauty to be found in “leftist” expression is merely the unconscious presence of traditional, organic, discriminatory, and thus “rightist” principles.
‘The beauty to be found in “leftist” expression is merely the unconscious presence of traditional, organic, discriminatory, and thus “rightist” principles.’
Not sure what you mean by this.
Were Gaugin or Van Gogh left? Or what about Rimbaud?
Hitler and Goebbels would have thought so but they were socialists. They liked Monet, I think. Paul Klee was included in the Entartatete Kunst shows. So was Picasso, who today maybe has the all-time highest sales at auction of $3.2 billion.
Is there even such a thing as left vs. right art? The communists rejected modernism too and eventually only sponsored “Social Realism.” Lenin, who hung out in Zurich near the Dadaists at their Cabaret Voltaire never trusted or commissioned modernists.
“Is there such a thing as left vs. right art?”
Maybe not, but there is art produced by leftists and rightists and my point was that there is an inversely proportional relationship between beauty and the degree of permeation a work has of leftist principles. My thesis here is that leftism is inherently opposed to art in its essence. It’s an a priori argument based on the essences of leftist and rightist worldviews as I perceive them, so individual examples would need to be thought about and explored. The idea, though, is that since the right upholds what is beautiful and differentiated and ordered in principle and the left represents the dissolution of those traditional values and modes of thought in principle, the left is therefore inherently anathema to art as such. Further, the left has artificiality built into it, which might explain the ascendancy of irony and kitsch in the realm of modern culture.
It’s funny you mentioned kitsch as I was just thinking of garden gnomes and mass-produced paintings. When I think of kitsch, a term introduced by the hard left critic Clement Greenberg, I don’t think of modern art, although it is now increasingly banal, predictable and dull.
Jeff Koons beats them all by self-consciously mass-producing kitsch.
Fact is, the modern art market these days is super self-conscious status marking. It reminds me of christian relics in the Middle Ages but they had to perform miracles. Maybe the miracles today are the prices.
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