Chose a work of art that you like, in any medium, from any period, classical or contemporary, high Art or popular culture…
With reference to some of the general principles that I’ve been outlining in this module, tell me why you think it is a work of Art?
Amongst the principles I have been emphasising are:
Art as conscious, expressive representation of the joy and beauty of the experience of being alive together; an affirmative, imaginative celebration of Life, and thereby to create and to re-create life out of Life (from the primordial & prehistoric all the way through to the present, for eg.)
Art as desire to grasp and to express and to give form to the experience of liminality and historical transformation, and its corresponding moods of paradox and ambivalence, ecstasy and melancholy (in Durer’s Melancholia, for e.g. and in Rembrandt, van Gogh, Klimt etc).
Art as the “will to unify those most extreme poles of life that constantly want to break in two” (as Simmel discusses in Michelangelo, for eg); whilst not resolving such poles [life and death, the individual and the collective, the Beautiful and the Sublime, for instance] into premature and false harmony [a pretty picture to decorate the living room wall, or ‘radio friendly moderate rock’, for instance] but rather, as Bataille says “to bring into a world founded on discontinuity as much continuity as such a world could sustain”
Art’s concern [in portraiture, (since Leonardo, all the way through to Khalo and Warhol)] with the enigma of the inner life, the spirit, the soul, the irreducible character of the person as a unique individual person
Art as ‘redemptive’, seeking to restore ‘aura’ -the unifying & vivifying spiritus mundi and the uniqueness and dignity of the person where they are endangered & erased by modern technologies and ideologies of mass production and mass extermination (e.g. Walter Benjamin on art in the age of mechanical reproduction; Brasse’s Auschwitz photographs, and similar ways through Art seeks to deliver us from sin and spiritual death.
Art (in whatever form) as containing the “three things that are required for beauty” according to James Joyce: “Integrity, Symmetry, and Radiance.”
Art as tthe artistic imperative to go on writing when there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express; when The task of the artist now is to find a form that accommodates the mess (Beckett).
