Beauty is now only one of our abstract notions, and verily no notion deduced from actual Life, but from the lesson-ed Grecian art. That which can only be perceived and felt in the full warm joy of all the senses, has become the object of aesthetic speculation; and, confronted with the axioms of the Metaphysician, our modern art-professor sighs again for Ionic skies, beneath which alone (in his opinion) can Beauty ever thrive. But here, again, he keeps his eyes involuntarily fixed on the only remaining, dull and faded link that connects the art of Greece with our own time, the plastic art and notably the natural Material from which it fashioned forms. He thus forgets entirely that the fashioner of those statues was first and foremost an artist Man, and that he only copied in those works the actual artwork he had carried out upon and with his own warm, living body. The Beauty to which the artist at least erected marble statues, he had felt before, and tasted, with the highest joy of sense; to him this tasting had been a true instinctive need, and this need was none other than—Love.That which a man loves, that deems he beautiful; that which strong, free Men—who in community are all that of their essence they can be—that which they love in common, that is in very surety beautiful. No other natural standard exists for true, not inculcated, Beauty. In their joy at this beauty, will the Freemen of the Future fashion works of Art such as they needs must fashion to content their measurelessly heightened need. Everywhere, in every Climate, will these works be such wise fashioned as to answer to the purely human need inspired by native skies: they will be beautiful alike and perfect, for reason that in them the highest need of Man is satisfied. But in the boundless intercourse of Future Men, the thousand individual qualities that shall have sprung from human Need, in answer to the divers idiosyncrasies of Climate,—so soon as ever they have raised themselves to the height of the universal Human, and therefore universally Intelligible,—will mutually react on one another in fertilising interchange, and blossom forth to joint 'all-human' artworks, of whose amplitude and splendour our art-sense of to-day, with its eternal clinging to the fetters of the old and dead, can conceive no jot or title.- Art and Climate
You faggots love to post book quotes, with no commentary of your own, to appear intelligent and cultured. Anyone can rip from a book. What are your thoughts on this quote, OP?
>>23541348The Op quote is a counterthrust to all superficial chatter about art; to chatter about the quote itself would be to say as much, 'I didn't understand a word'.
>>23541407Disagree. It is equally but differently superficial.
