Philosophy of Art

Wilson, Erik wrote:

THE COMIC MODE AND THE MUMMY’S MELANCHOLIA

The first guide to the comic currents of Poe’s mummified anthropos is, unexpectedly, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus.
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen offers his theory of the aesthetics of tragedy. Though he agrees with Aristotle’s idea that tragedy raises terror and pity in the audience, he believes that the great philosopher did not sufficiently define these terms. Stephen first distinguishes between aesthetic and nonaesthetic pity and terror. Improper art and improper artistic feelings are kinetic.
Kinetic works spur desire and loathing. Setting these states into motion, kinetic art is not really art. It is either ‘pornographical or didactic,’ inciting the urge ‘to posses’ or the impulse ‘to abandon.’
In this way, improper art participates in the limitations of the fall.
It stokes the ego, inspiring it to struggle toward its yearnings or to avoid its aversions.
Kinetic work also comforts the ego; it feeds it with the conventions that it expects—stereotypical objects of sensual desire, familiar forms of violence. Seducing the ego with abstractions, improper art alienates from lived experience.
Proper aesthetic events and proper aesthetic emotions are static. They arrest fear and desire. They disarm the abstractions that generate didacticism and pornography. Tragic pity does not evoke a desire toward a suffering object but ‘arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.’
The terror evoked by tragedy does not induce an aversion from the fearsome event. It ‘arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.’
In elevating the beholder above fear and desire, static art pulls one away from the fallen ego and toward an unfallen self, an ideal human form untroubled by yearning or aversion—the anthropos.
This kind of art shatters the ego’s fixations and reveals the abiding pain. Opening to what is constant, tragedy gestures toward the mysteries at the core of life.
Stephen develops these final points. Proper arts elevate the mind beyond fear and desire through their revelations of concrete resonances.
What Stephen calls the ‘esthetic image’ first strikes the mind as a ‘luminously’ ‘selfbounded and selfcontained’ event arising uniquely from ‘the immeasurable background of space and time.’
It shines as this thing and nothing else. It is one whole. It possesses integritas. The mind follows the ‘immediate perception’ of the synthetic whole with an ‘analysis of apprehension,’ an attention to how the parts cohere into the whole, how the whole gathers the parts. The image now appears as a ‘complex,’ a harmony of many and one. It manifests consonantia.
After one has immediately perceived the image as one thing and mediately apprehended it as a consonance of whole and parts, one is finally struck by its shimmering claritas, its radiance as this thing and nothing else, its quidditas. Only this image, here, now, merges parts and whole in this way. The mind beholding this threefold beauty experiences ‘the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state... [an]enchantment of the heart.’ This mind experiences gnosis, sudden insight into the ideal—the Eden, the anthropos, from which it has fallen away and toward which it returns.
[The Melancholy Android]

When art seduces and coerces it stands before nature as god before gods, declaring itself above them, or their equal.

Denial of free-will places mankind in the theatre seats of existence; a passive audience who’s reactions are part of the performance.

A crowd’s bioenergies are released through the mediating performances of actors; surrogate, idealized selves, who with their hyperactivity, and hyper-displays, acting out a hyper-reality, offer inactive bystanders a way of releasing libidinal drives they have been taught to supress and guiltily deny.

Reality disappears behind heavy curtains and dimmed lights. All that remains is the well-lit stage and the actors playing parts so extraordinary that they become relieving conduits for the audience’s stresses, repressions and ensuing, gradually increasing, ennui. When the performance is over the lights go on, and the curtains fall; the crowd slowly shuffling back into their ordinary, repetitive, mundane lives.
Something remains: a psychological unburdening, invigorating the spirit, and preparing it for a long drive home and the next day’s tediousness.

The Greeks knew how dangerous art was to the hearts and minds of the immature and undeveloped.
In the wrong hands it has the capacity to destroy civilizations.

Wilde, Oscar wrote:

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

The basic function of art:
Distraction, Indoctrination, Venting.

Are is the externalization - outward projection - of esoteric processes and reaction to reality; it is the inconspicuous made conspicuous.

Two movements distinguishing artistic motive:
From the outside inward; from the inside outward.
The first representing reality and the artist's relationship with it; the second representing the artist's reactions to reality and his feelings, sensations, emotions and corrective alternatives and coping methods.

Philosophy is an art-form.

Hawkes, David wrote:

An actor’s appearance is different from his essence, and it is impossible to interpret his lines as expressions of his thoughts. The body of the actor itself becomes a performative sign, and the theater depends for its effect on the audience’s willingness to treat this sign as if it were constitutive of reality for the duration of the play.
An actor, in short, is alien to his real self, and this leads critics like William Worthen to refer to acting’s ‘Satanic duplicity.’

The willingness found in the audience's unconscious desire to suspend reason and surrender to a performance is what lends credence to the actor’s role; a suspension up for continuous revision, the audience lending what it may withhold if the performance fails to meet its expectations.

Performing before others, successfully convincing and seducing them to suspend disbelief, is the stuff of magic – a collectivized simulated simulacrum.

Actors help an audience become better socioeconomic characters.

Actor's Genius
Humans can imitate chimpanzees convincingly, if they have talent; chimpanzees cannot imitate humans convincingly, no matter their talents.

Inherited traits, forged and sharpened by pathos is what brings forth talent, style, and charisma.
A gifted actor can embody a character because he has a multitude of experiences to draw inspiration from; the talentless can only imitate the perceived, and can never embody a role.

An actor's appeal is the product of his ability to stir-up emotions in the audience; standing-in, for them, in extraordinary situations they will never personally experience, offering them an ideal worth emulating – emotional seduction using crafted appearances within contrived circumstances.

Alienating oneself through an icon, a symbol, a word; a welcomed relief for the common man who is the by-product of sheltering and human interventions upon natural processes. Modern man wonders if he deserves an existence he desperately holds onto as the only thing he knows or will ever know.
To escape the reality of oneself, one’s nature/past, so as to then reinvent oneself, out of nowhere and in accordance with popular ideas/ideals and ambitions: this is what liberty and individuality is in modern contexts.
Money purchases the means by which this escape can become plausible, through a convincing performance the audience is forced to believe. [ MANifesto: Economics – Money] There is only the pretense, the act, the performance of what is necessary for there to be an escape from the regimented routines of modern existence. The individual dies, to be reborn in a new guise. Through symbolic death he is liberated from his past, from nature, and then reborn as a new and improved character.

Sartre, Jean-Paul wrote:

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

The actor is the idea/ideal top<>down thinker, i.e., he begins with an imitation of the manifested and then works backwards, trying to get into the skin of another.
The depth of a performance determined by how much of a past an actor can integrate into his imitation.

The spectator wants to believe, the conjurer wants them to believe; both actor and audience are in a state of congruence, ephemerally partnering in the construction and maintenance of an alternate reality. Scripted words offering the dialectic means of relating.
A performer suspending his own skepticism, forgetting himself through the performance, urging the audience to suspend their disbelief as evidence of a shared sacrifice. [ MANifesto: Society – Magic]

Before the movie theater there was the theater itself. Modernity is a vast theater of the absurd – a theatre liberated from a specific time and place. The theatre is everywhere and nowhere, and all become actors in an improvisational play.

Art of Performance
A clown measures his impact on the world using the mediation of an audience, and their spontaneous reactions; appreciation of his performance is expressed in neurological releases of energy – intercourse reaching a shared climax.
The intent of the clown's performance is to release the audience’s accumulated shame, and their common anxiety concerning being discovered as being frauds, i.e., bad performers. In the process a performer experiences power as a primary reward. A crowd’s energy washes over him, cleansing him of his own contained shames and stresses. Consistency of effect proffers him a secondary reward of fame & fortune, via tokens of appreciation. The audience unloading both accumulated stress and resources upon him, as praise, motivating the performer to repeat his performance indefinitely.

Nietzsche, Friedrich wrote:

The problem of the actor has troubled me for the longest time. I felt unsure (and sometimes still do) whether it is not only from this angle that one can get at the dangerous concept of the ‘artist’ – a concept that has so far been treated with unpardonable generosity. Falseness with a good conscience; the delight in simulation exploding as a power that pushes aside one's so-called ‘character,’ flooding it and at times extinguishing it; the inner craving for a role and mask, for appearance; an excess of the capacity for all kinds of adaptations that can no longer be satisfied in the service of the most immediate and narrowest utility – all of this is perhaps not only peculiar to the actor? Such an instinct will have developed most easily in families of the lower classes who had to survive under changing pressures and coercions, in deep dependency, who had to cut their coat according to the cloth, always adapting themselves again to new circumstances, who always had to change their mien and posture, until they learned gradually to turn their coat with every wind and thus virtually to become a coat – and masters of the incorporated and inveterate art of eternally playing hide-and-seek, which in the case of animals is called mimicry – until eventually this capacity, accumulated from generation to generation, becomes domineering, unreasonable, and intractable an instinct that learns to lord it over other instincts, and generates the actor, the ‘artist’ (the zany, the teller of lies, the buffoon, fool, clown at first, as well as the classical servant, Gil Blas; for it is in such types that we find the pre-history of the artist and often enough even of the ‘genius’).
In superior social conditions, too, a similar human type develops under similar pressures; only in such cases the histrionic instinct is usually barely kept under control by another instinct; for example, in the case of ‘diplomats’.
Incidentally, I am inclined to believe that a good diplomat would always be free to become a good stage actor if he wished – if only he we were ‘free’. As for the Jews, the people who possess the art of adaptability par excellence, this train of thought suggests immediately that one might see them virtually as a world-historical arrangement for the production of actors, a veritable breeding ground for actors. And it really is high time to ask: What good actor today is not – a Jew? The Jew as a born ‘man of letters,’ as the true master of the European press, also exercises his power by virtue of his histrionic gifts; for the man of letters is essentially an actor: He plays the ‘expert,’ the ‘specialist’.

[ MANifesto: Education – Experts]

A convincing actor believes in his own performance, feeling insulted if he is exposed as playing a role in accordance with a written script – a sacred text towards which he remains religiously loyal.
His performance is imbued with the magical power of the script which he remains true to, or slightly modifies, i.e., creatively improvising, in agreement with its underlying intent, i.e., objective.
The actor’s personæ – his/her inherited personality – disappears within the public performing caricature/character the script fabricates and leads toward an ending, containing his performance within its intent.
A gifted actor able to play any role, becomes anyone at any time: sometimes black, sometimes white; sometimes religious sometimes secular; sometimes victim sometimes victimizer, depending on what the script demands of him.
Genes to Memes. [ MANifesto: Word Wars – Gene & Meme Dynamics]

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Art is life.. it brings lives to life.. the catalyst, for our inner converters.

Would we be this type of human without Art, or would we be something else.. another different type of human, if it weren’t for Art?

Is it not up to the individual to not allow Art to manipulate and coerce them.. are they unthinking puppets and pawns, in the theatre of life?

Biological Reproduction is the highest form of art, despite being forgone and looked down upon by many "artists" particularly moderns.

There is no art without an organism that evolved self-consciousness and abstract thought.
Art is abstraction given form to be shared, communicated, externalized.

A bird's call is a rudimentary form of art; a sheep's bleating...or anything communicating a state of mind.

Language is a quintessentially human form of art.
Through art minds can be influenced, manipulated, exploited, affected, especially undeveloped impressionable minds, or minds with deep insecurities and obsessive personalities.

Impulso Oscuro wrote:

Biological Reproduction is the highest form of art, despite being forgone and looked down upon by many "artists" particularly moderns.

Yes...in my mind creativity is a sublimation of procreativity - libidinal energies, maintained in a state of readiness, redirected towards artistic innovation.
The mind externalizes its understanding of itself.
This is also what technologies are - art with a utility, imitating man's knowledge and understanding of himself.