After Kant, and especially after Kant’s romantic disciples, art came to be viewed as a matter of beautiful appearance, consciously defined in contrast to practical reality. This had not always been the Western conception of art. Gadamer comments, “Traditionally the purpose of ‘art,’ which also includes all conscious transformation of nature for human use, was to supplement and fill the gaps left open by nature. And ‘the fine arts,’ as long as they are seen in this framework, are a perfecting of reality, not appearances that mask, veil, or transfigure it.” A painting or poem, in this view, does not hide reality but reveals its true character. Once art is seen as appearance, however, it floats free of reality, and becomes an autonomous realm of its own.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Greetings on a Morning Walk
Blackberry vines, you hold this ground in the shade of a willow: all thorns, no fruit. *…
An Outline of Trees
They rise above us, arching, spreading, thin Where trunk and bough give way to veining twig. We…
Fallacy
A shadow cast by something invisible falls on the white cover of a book lying on my…
