(June 1, 2022 at 11:13 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: What I like about the visual arts are the aspects that resist narative...i.e. what cannot be coveyed by words.
Yes, very much agreed. There is a kind of direct impact of beauty, unmediated by concepts, which I think the best art has.
This is not to say it will be equally available to everyone all the time. We are open to different things differently. But gaining access to that beauty doesn't come through analysis or calculation.
Quote:So, while I find literary analyis interesting, it generally does not evoke in me an aesthetic response...a direct encounter with Beauty. The exceptions that comes to mind are Borges's short stories. But even those do not approach the affect I get from Raeburn portraits or a Matta.
I would like to make a distinction between literary analysis and literary beauty. Analysis is school stuff, and the article I linked to is doing that kind of thing. But there is also non-analytical literary beauty, and Borges I think is a perfect example.
There are some pictures which are good to look at. Not because we gain from them in some tangible way -- they are not educational or morally improving -- but because it is just good to see them. Looking at them is an end in itself.
Likewise, there is some music which is just good to hear.
And I would suggest that there are some concepts or sentences which it is just good to think. Holding them in the mind is a pleasure and an end in itself. These generally come to us through literature, and Borges is perhaps particularly aware of this as a goal. But it's in pretty much every great book, I think.
Aristotle says that the best thing in any life, and the end point of all our striving, is to contemplate certain good concepts. This is pretty close to what I think about art, although I can't go along with him on which concepts it is best to hold in one's mind. (Though this may be a failure on my part, rather than an error on his.)
