“Protest artists fail to realize that beauty is the ultimate protest against ugliness, which is why the absence of beauty in their works show that they are not critical. They are in fact creative failures. Indeed, the inability to imagine beauty is a sign of the creative inadequacy of post-aesthetic modern art.”

Does contemporary art routinely allow or foster that heightened form of sense experience that is “inherently beautiful and affords pure pleasure”?

“In a post-aesthetic art world the work of art becomes a bully pulpit, and the artist tries to bully the spectator into believing what the artist believes. He becomes a self-righteous bully preaching to us (or rather at us) about what we already know–the ugliness and injustice of the world–without offering any aesthetic, contemplative alternative to it. [....] Most disastrously, the supposedly moral use of art as meliorative criticism and social advocacy abandons the civilized idea that art is the privileged space of contemplation, and as such a reprieve and sanctuary from the barbarism of the world–however much that may be its subject matter–and thus a psychic space in which we can own ourselves and survive, that is, realize autonomy, however aware we are of the special and limited conditions in which it is possible. It ignores the ethics inherent in aesthetics and beauty. Aesthetic contemplation–as distinct from art as a kind of social practice and even theorizing (manque) about the world–is a way of caring for one’s psyche. Art will serve the mental health of whomever turns to it in pursuit of aesthetic experience and beauty.”

“It took little more than half a century to undo Kandinsky’s idea that art was the last bastion of spirituality against materialism. It seems no accident that it was an American artist [Andy Warhol] who elevated commercial art–art that is a means to a commercial end, that is, art that exists to make money–over high art, that is, art which remains an aesthetic and existential end in itself, however much money may appropriate it.”

Arthur Danto’s comments are rather revealing: “It is a matter of some irony in my own case that while the aesthetics of Pop Art opened art up for me to philosophical analysis, aesthetics itself has until now had little to contribute to my philosophy of art.” And, “Things began to change somewhat in the 1990s. Beauty was provocatively declared to be the defining problem of the decade by the widely admired art writer Dave Hickey, and this was hailed as exciting thought. My sense is that it was exciting less because of beauty itself, than because beauty was proxy for something that had almost disappeared from most of one’s encounters with art, namely enjoyment and pleasure.” And then: “Beauty is but one of an immense range of aesthetic qualities, and philosphical aesthetics has been paralyzed by focusing as narrowly on beauty as it has. But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a value, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human life means.” From Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003). Cf. Crispin Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty (2004).

*Incidentally, or not, the term for this from Indian aesthetics is rasa, ‘aesthetic relish’.

**Cf. Indic aesthetics, in which the “heart” is the locus of “emotional, intellectual and intuitive integration, a point of refined emotional realisation and one that can lead the individual to a transcendent state.” The purifed state of rasa experience might favorably be likened to this “ego orgasm,” although for the former aesthetic tradition, it amounts to transcendence of the ego, the pleasurable aspects of the experience rightly connoted by reference to “orgasm” (the rough Sanskrit equivalent for which is ‘ananda,’ or ‘bliss’).

The quoted material is from Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art (2004).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070912094045.htm

“What happens to poetry in the Digital Age? In one of the first academic works in the field, Swedish researcher Maria Engberg has studied how the ability of the computer to combine words, images, movement, and sounds is impacting both writing and reading.

***

She has analyzed works by English-speaking poets such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, and Thomas Swiss. The focus is on space, time, movement, and word and image constructions. The poems were written, or rather created, with the help of computer technology and published on the Internet or CDs, for instance.

Some of the works can be experienced as three-dimensional installations, created in space using so-called vr-cubes and augmented-reality environments. Maria Engberg examines how the forms of the poems construct different reader roles that challenge traditional views of poetry and reading, formed by the visual conventions of the printed page. “

I think you’re right to suggest there will be wholly new art forms developing out of the present age. That’s one reason I really enjoyed an exhibition of digital art at the Whitney. And frankly, the egalitarian side of me applauds this evolution–a work on the web is far more accessible than one hung in a museum (or reproductions trapped, via clunky copyrights, behind a wall of permissions and inconvenience).

But I would like to preserve the sense that art or literature can decline. Otherwise, wouldn’t the very expression “dark age” be meaningless?

Besides which, why should we even hold up poetry as a great art form now because it was a great art form then? We might as well look at the early impressionists and mourn their work’s lack of realism.

The whole thesis here compares ripe oranges to stale apples, and further assumes that oranges are categorically preferable to apples anyhow.