Ivan Kramskoi
On the previous Wednesday Thoughts on Art, we were left wondering on the meanings of aestheticism. The everyday world is somewhat ugly and chaotic; it rarely presents us with the harmony and congruity that we are left to search within Art. It is then a rather reasonable assumption to define art as a gateway to a world of balance and beauty - where one can wash the spirit from the trivial - and find a space replete with Meaning, something so hard to find among the random events of our days. When our escape engulfs the nature of what we try to escape, we grow uneasy. And maybe that’s the reason why we tend to resist unpleasantness among the definition of Aesthetic - and find so many pieces to be “unaesthetic” - because they are uneasy, unbalanced, disturbing or just plain ugly. But can’t that attitude, of nothing more but facing the nature of what is presented to us, without any further objective than pure observation, be the essential characteristic of an aesthetic attitude? Can we sit down in despair and reflect on an unsettling aesthetic? We’ll look for the answers next week!
Artur Deus Dionisio