Hegel on the Future of Art

How many of us would seriously place Rauschenberg besides Rembrandt, Cage besides Bach? Stepping into a museum or concert hall we enter an aesthetic church, a sublime and rather chilly necropolis, stretching back across time, where Leonardo and Van Gogh, Palestrina and Beethoven join frozen hands. Part of this attitude is an often almost religious reverence and respect, but also a certain indifference. We sense that what truly matters lies elsewhere. What needs preserving does so precisely because it has lost its place in our world and must therefore be given a special place -- often at great expense.

Karsten Harries, "Hegel on the Future of Art"
1974

The End of Art

[Post-aesthetic art] must be swallowed raw -- in post-aesthetic art the idea is raw and intellectually and emotionally undigested, and there is little or no art. Nuance and subtlety are expendable; the message is all, and it is ultimately a self-righteous one, calling for a new conformity and simplicity in its conception of the social truth. Indeed, the simpler the message the better, for a simple message is easier to communicate to the masses than a dialectically complex one. Ideas become slogans -- banner headlines -- in ideological art, if it can still be called art. For it seems more like a poor cousin of the mass media, lacking both their slickness and outreach. Indeed, the point is to be as "artless" as possible, for art, after all, is a distracting illusion appealing to the senses not the revolutionary-minded.

Donald Kuspit, The End of Art
2004

The End of Art

If, as Hegel writes, "it is the function of art to present ultimate reality to our immediate perception in sensuous shape," then in great music and great musical painting the sensuously immediate is ultimate reality. Revelation and presentation are reconciled. They are inseparable in aesthetic experience. Thus, great music and great musical painting are the most realized arts. They are artistic consciousness at its most unconditional, that is, unconditioned by worldly concerns.

Donald Kuspit, The End of Art
2004

Tinkers

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the axe bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

Tinkers, Paul Harding
2009

Tinkers

To Howard, this was the best part of the afternoon, when folds of night mingled with bands of day. He resisted the desire to stop the wagon and give Prince Edward an apple and sit quietly and become a part of the slow freshet of night, or to stop the wagon and simple remain on the bench and watch the shadows approach and pool around the wagon wheels and Prince Edward's hooves and eventually reach the soles of his shoes and then his ankles, until mule, cart, and man were submerged in the flood tide of night, because the secrets gathered in the shadows at the tree line that rustled and waited until he passed, and which made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and his scalp tighten when he felt them flooding, invisible, the road around him, were dispelled each time he turned his direct attention to them, scattered to just beyond his sight. The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine and subtle to be observed with my blunt eye --water sac and nerves, miracle itself, fine itself: light catcher. But the thing itself is not forest and light and dark, but something else scattered by my coarse gaze, by my dumb intention. The quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breezes might part and I'd be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. The weaver might have made one bad loop in the foliage of a sugar maple by the road and that one loop of whatever the thread might be wound from --light, gravity, dark from stars -- had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-and-orange leaves and bare branches and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knit from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width's hole, which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear; that might offer to the simple touch a measure o tranquillity or reassurance.

Tinkers, Paul Harding
2009

Tinkers

Early man sought always methods of capturing time more precisely than casting the shadows of Apollo's chariot upon a graded iron disk (for when the sun sank behind the hills in the west, what then?), or burning oil in a glass lamp maked at intervals so the crude hours might be gleaned from the disappearing fuel. The reasonable, sensitive soul who perhaps one day while taking his rest along the banks of a bubbling brook came to hear, in that half-dream, half-wakeful state during which so many men seem most receptive to perceiving the pulleys and winches that hoist the clouds, the heavenly bellows that push the winds, the cogs and wheels that turn the globe, came to hear a regularity in the slivery song of water over pebbles, that soul is unknown to us. Let us remark, then, that it is good enough to induce him out of the profusions of the past, perhaps fit him with thick sandals and a steady hand, a heart open to nature and a head devoted to the advancement of men, and watch in admiration as he pokes and fiddles and persists at various machines until he arrives at a device which marks time by a steady flow of water through its guts.

Tinkers, Paul Harding
2009