The Romantic Manifesto Part II

Courtesy of my dad from his collections in Nemstudio. 

Check out his website for more art, nemstudio.portfoliobox.net

Ever wondered why your life is a mundane chores,dragging you day and night with piles of burden tied around your head giving you no space to breath and to think straight? Let alone to see the beauty of it. Not a single day passed without you having to think about problems and what might impede you in your pursuit of a full and prosperous life.

So,what's then could help you to fuel forward? To motivate you to keep going albeit the harshness of reality and the crudeness of it?

According to Ayn Rand, art does play a role in fulfilling man's need. Not of his material but of his mind,his conscience. At times when comfort and strength is in need,that's when you'll seek for art. Imagine your life without art? Without music,novels,and movies?

Through art, a person can embodies and experiences the values offered to him by the artist which he is longing for (the values) but much too far to fetch if he wanted to have it in a whole package on a scale of daily life. Art,being an intergration, of the artist's metaphysical views of life, a viewer will receive it directly & concretely as if it is an entity while his mind is doing the work of breaking up the concretization into intelligible abstractions under his faculty of conceptual thinking.

Although art is a concretization of metaphysics, one has to keep in mind that art is an end in itself. The purpose of art is to show,not to teach. It is different from other field of knowledge where they have their practical ends. When we look at a piece of art,what we do is contemplate, we absorb the feeling that it gives to us,let it wander in our consciousness to pick up similarities and familiarities that results in self-pleasure or contradictions and incongruities that called upon the unpleasants and distasteful feelings.

So,it is proper to say that,since art is an end in itself,we dont consider its metaphysical value as the determinant whether it is a piece of art or not. Here, a metaphysical and premises error will not discredit it as an art,so long as the creation of it is not based on something other than the artist's metaphysical value-judgements.

You can say "Its a great piece of art,but i dont like it",because esthetically its a fine work by the artist but metaphysically,it is against your philosophy of life. You dont see life as what the artist showed. So you disagree.

This is then tells us that in order to evaluate a piece of art,you dont have to agree with the artist's philosophy. Esthetic judgement requires a person to identify the artist's theme,by the way he intergrates and projects his abstractions together with the technical mastery elements in his work. Go and try to distinguish two different paintings which exemplified this criterion. One which you disagree with the artist's philosphy but esthetically satisfying and the other which you find similarities in your views of life but lower in its esthetic value.

Talk art again later.

The Romantic Manifesto

"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements." 

This book by Ayn Rand discusses about art and literature, on how to understand and to evaluate art objectively according to its esthetical and metaphysical values. The book arrived a couple of days earlier together with three other books from the author that i bought at Barnes&Nobles. Well, ive been wanting to understand art my whole life as i was surrounded by walls full of frames and paintings since i was a kid. My dad is an abstract painter and an Expressionist. Even so,he never taught me nor show how to understand his art. Only by the titles i tried to understand what he was trying to convey. I guess i always learn things myself firsthand before people's help.There was no concepts or proper guidance as yet for me to indulge in this branch of life.

For a person who is familiar with Ayn Rand's Objectivism,i was called to know what the author had to say about art and the philosophy behind it. By definition, art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements. Thus,it requires the artist and the observer to do some mind workups and mental exercises in order to create and to perceive art. From the eyes of an artist,he tries to concretize the abstractions that he formed in his conceptual thinking into a reality being. It is said that art is a concretization of metaphysics. On the other hand, the observer, will perceive the concretized abstraction created by the artist and through a process of induction,he tries to make it intelligible.

How do both of them communicate,technically? By what means? What is the bridge that ties the creator and the perceiver?

Sense of life.

" A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics,an emotional,subconsciously intergrated appraisal of man and of existence." This is the source from which man creates his art and by this means a viewer can let the experience enters his soul. I always wonder everytime i look up at my dad's paintings, I ask myself, "what do i feel?" and i try to think what was his emotion when he was working on that particular piece. I usually found that his mental state and what was going on in his life during that time determined what would be expressed on the canvas. 

How could we understand this sense of life? 

Sense of life is a sum up,an emotional generalization that we formed in ourselves before we acquired a mature philosophical thinking towards things or conditions in our lives. It's a sort of 'rule' or 'emotional set' that we have and it will invoke particular emotions when we are confronted with something. Given an example, an expensive car. For people who admire and appreciate greatness, his sense of life will give him the feeling of grandiosity at the sight of the car. While on the other hand, a person who despises excellency will feel disgust and hatred. That is how your sense of life works. And remember,it is a build up, a sum up. Meaning it depends on how you treat your emotions from the start. Do you let your emotions filled with random chances,cheap whims,repeating others or you fill it with reasons, mental evaluations, and intelligency?

Lots to say in other entries. Ill write about the purpose and what art means in our lives. Stay tuned.