Ruminations on Aesthetics

[An old post after a tutorial]

Today's KI lesson reminded me of why I would not, under the most dire circumstances, attempt to write an essay on aesthetics. This blog entry will also serve to consolidate the issues we talked about.

Aesthetics are a vague and murky territory. Before we can even discuss about aesthetic knowledge, we must first ask what the "aesthetic" is. It cannot simply be beauty because an aesthetic creation, like a painting, is not the same as a scene with aesthetic appeal, such as a waterfall. Indeed, art work is created and appreciated but defining the aesthetic takes more than creation for we do not put plastic bags on pedestals in museums. An object must have an aesthetically significant form before it can be called a piece of art - music is a perfect example for if the notes are not harmonised and timed soundly (pun intended), only noise results.

However, this theory of significant form (Clive Bell's actually, even though Sandeep and I came up with the idea independently) begs the question of what is actually aesthetically 'significant'. It cannot be a simple mish-mash of devices. Think of poetry for instance. The combination of apocalyptic imagery, dactyls and iambic pentameters in fourteen lines does not make a poem. It is not like geometry where three straight lines with each tip touching the other inevitably forms a triangle. The piece of art has to engage our mental and/or sensuous* faculties.

That being said, humanity has a curious delineation between art and non-art. Consider ballet: a fine art from the French Court (before their heads were guillotined) that emphasis grace, expression and mastery of one's body to music. Then we see a 'sport' called rhythmic gymnastics which emphasise the exact same qualities but is called an Olympic sport, not an art, even though competitions exist for both ballerinas and rhythmic gymnasts at the global level. Clearly, there is a sociological factor involved and this is not limited to dance. If I were to play King Lear in colloquial Singaporean english with every nose-picking, public spitting and hokkien swearing habit woven into the characters, it would be considered a desecration of Shakespeare - both in Britain and Singapore - and nothing short of violating English Literature's patron saint.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that aesthetic classifications are inevitably hollow. Tragedies for instance have to center around character(s) who do not deserve a miserable outcome - if they did, it would be called justice. From Aristotle's time, people have packed theatres for tear-jerking cathartic tragedies which makes one ask whether the study of aesthetics is the study of psychological reactions to art rather than art-in-itself. Such an approach does not appear prima facie to be tenable. A psychological approach will necessitate the employment of psychological theories but the discipline is still in the Kuhnian pre-science phase - the grain and chaff have not been separated - and it is unclear if they can provide a reliable framework for aesthetic analysis.

Despite these epistemological conundrums, artists continue their creative activities much like how science developed despite Popper, Kuhn, Duhem-Quine and issues of 'underdetermination'. In fact, art has and continues to feature beyond the aesthetic realm into the moral and political sphere. Think of Singapore's - or any country's - national day songs. Think of how optimistic it sounds and feels, but then we see and feel the direct opposite when we read about recessions and pandemics. Aesthetic appeal has been confounded with political appeal and that is how propaganda works - the circumvention of reason to manipulate the emotions that direct action and thought.

This has made many intellectuals ask if aesthetic value is synonymous with moral value. I argue that art is defined by aesthetic value and moral considerations can enhance it but not replace it. If we were to judge a piece of art based on moral value, we find that an essay on utilitarianism can ludicrously qualify as a work of art even though it fails to engage us in the same way as a novel would. There is a qualitative distinction present. However, this begs the question of where we can draw the line between art and non-art. You have read the problems listed above but now I present one more dimension: time.

In 2007, I visited an artists' village in Shanghai. There I saw a sculpture of 3 miniature Red Guards cast in some glazed material. They were happy and fat but instead of holding Mao's little red book in their arms, they held McDonald's little red pack of fries to their chest in a way reminiscent of many propaganda posters. The artist would have been shot dead if this appeared during the Cultural Revolution; it would be the modern equivalent of making a crucifix with Jesus using it like a baseball bat but. But it wasn't the cultural revolution - it was the 21st century, and such items previously scorned are now part of the emerging pop culture centered around Mao who, I think, would turn in his grave if he knew what his personality cult had become.

Ok, I guess I'd better leave morality and law for another blog entry. Until then, I'd like to declare my everlasting fascination with Knowledge and Inquiry and praise it for propelling my intellectual faculties beyond what I ever imagined. Hail Tharman! Hail Shanmugaratnam! (A pity about the compulsory contrasting subject clause).

*Sensuous refers to our senses, but sensual has sexual overtones. Just remember the phallic 'l' in sensual

^Yes, this is an actual word for vainglorious expansionistic foreign policies.

26 OCT 2009