Art & Life - the aesthetic link

- Colin Davies -

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" Someone who would never even contemplate going to an art gallery or a concert might, nevertheless be deeply concerned about the things that artists and those who are interested in art would regard as being of fundamental importance. It would, indeed, be very odd if this were not the case..

Nature: Aesthetics/Philosophy/General Education

CLV rating: AAA

The central concern of aesthetics is with the nature of our outstanding and appreciation of art. Some of the questions which it raises are :

• What makes something a work of art?
• Are there objective standards of taste?
• What is beauty?
• What is important about art?
• What role is played by the imagination in the creation and experience of art?
• Is art a sources if truth?
• What is the connection, if any, between art and the emotions?
• What is the nature and explanation of our enjoyment of art?

Many people believe that art is a minority interest and that is has little or no relevance to everyday life. Art, they suppose, is what hangs in galleries, is displayed in museums, performed in concert halls and theatres, and discussed in the literature departments if universities, places where the mass of people are not to be found and probably would not want to be found.

One of the most important of all the tasks of aesthetics is to show why it is wrong to separate art from life in this way. It is also one of the most difficult.

The following remakes on the matter are, therefore, no more than suggestions which seems to me to be worth thinking about.

In the everyday world most people frequently make judgments of aesthetic taste. They do so when they chose what to wear, when they purchase jewellery and kitchen utensils, furnish rooms, use make-up, take photographs, look at their own bodies in mirrors and other people's bodies on the beach, walk in the countryside, gaze at the night sky, buy presents, discuses the environment, wonder where they should live and whom they should marry.

Consider someone who is trying to decide which dress to wear. She is not just concerned with covering her body and keeping it warm. She is also concerned with how the dress looks and feels with its colour and texture and style. She wonders whether the dress will match other items of clothing, whether it will go with a particular hair style, skin colour, and type of make-up, whether it will enhance her appearance or make her look dowdy, whether it will be suitable for the occasion on which she will wear it, and so on.

Her choice is an aesthetic one, an exercise of taste.

It might be, though, that what is involved in choosing a dress has nothing in common with Guernica, the B minor Mass and King Lear. But this is not the case. The aesthetics of everyday life is not different in kind from the aesthetics of painting, music, architecture and the other arts.

Great works of art are a product of the imagination and appreciation of them requires imaginative under-standing. The same type of imaginative activity takes place when clothes are designed and chosen.

The person who wonders which dress to wear shares with the artist and the art-lover a concern for harmony, balance, shape and proportion. She wants to look exactly right. If she is to achieve this, all the details of her appearance must be suited to each other and be appearance must be suited to each other and be appropriate to the context in which the clothes are to be worn. But this is not essentially different from achievement in the arts.

A successful work of art, above everything else, one which provides us with the sense of being exactly right. We are aware of the interdependence of all its parts. We feel that there is nothing that could be added to it or subtracted from it that would improve it.

This is not the only area in which art and life share common ground. There is, for instance, a common language.

The Mona Lisa is beautiful, but so is Mabel Blumenfeld, my pet rabbit, and moonlight on the Mersey. Fashion models and swans are graceful as well as Makarova and Baryshnikov.

We say of both works of art and people that they are sad, cheerful, passionate, lively, amusing, charming, impulsive, feverish, composed, tranquil, gave, sober, thrilling, disturbing, and so on. And tragedy and comedy are, of course, not only to be found in the theatre.

Significantly, though less obviously, the language of art has much in common with the language of morals. We admire both works of art and people for their intelligence, realism, perceptiveness, clarity, sensitivity, emotional depth, spontaneity, compassion, objectively, wisdom and sincerity.

Art fails when it is sentimental, insincere, superficial, undiscriminating, lacking in integrity, and involves wishful thinking and self-deception.

But these are serious moral faults. The standards by reference to which we judge works of art are, therefore, the same as those by reference to which we judge human actions and attitudes and motives.

If this is true, it raises some interesting questions. For instance can there be an aesthetically good works of art which is also morally bad? If ethics and aesthetics share the same standards, the answer would seem to be no.

Even more interesting : Can someone be a morally good man and have bad aesthetic taste? Can someone be morally bad and have good aesthetic taste?

Evil is sometimes said to be banal; that is, it involves an odious lack of taste, But so do many television programmes. We might wonder, therefore, how someone can possibly enjoy watching Dallas unless he is morally degenerate.

Is he different only in degree from someone who enjoys watching people being tortured? Concentration camp, guards are, after all, notoriously sentimental, and it is, perhaps, not entirely a coincidence that they have this in common with the television watcher.

They both display a lack of realism and perceptiveness about the nature and quality of their own and other people's experience. In both cases, there is distortion, muddle, vulgarity and self-indulgence.

If there is this close connection of what is aesthetic with what is moral, then a person's aesthetic taste will not be just a part of his life, something which is essentially unconnected with the rest of it. It will, on the contrary, express the kind of person that he is.

He will display in his aesthetic choices and preferences the nature of his character and fundamental attitudes, the quality of his emotions and intellect, his political and religious beliefs, his understanding of himself and others.

And this will be true not merely of his preferences in the higher forms of art, but also of the aesthetics of his everyday life; for instance, of his choice of clothes, furniture, presents, apartment and friends.

A Sherlock Holmes of aesthetic could, perhaps, detect whether someone was morally corrupt not by inspecting his bank balance, but by observing his furnishings and examining his wardrobe.

The belief that art is not relevant to the everyday lives of most people seems, therefore, not to be true. People's choices and preferences often involve aesthetic considerations and their aesthetic taste expresses what is most central to their identities.

Someone who would never even contemplate going to an art gallery or a concert might, nevertheless be deeply concerned about the things that artists and those who are interested in art would regard as being of fundamental importance.

It would, indeed, be very odd if this were not the case. A life from which the aesthetic sense was completely absent would be one deprived of almost all of that which makes life interesting and pleasurable.

There would be no adventures of imagination, no enjoyment of nature, no appreciation of design or buildings or music, no awareness of beauty, no love.

It is hard to imagine what a life like that would be like. But whatever it is like, it is not a life that I, for one, would want to live.