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Wed 14 Feb, 2007 06:29 am
From immortality to abstraction to soul to religion to art
The idea of soul as it progresses through history is important consideration here. Original primitive art is an attempt to make concrete what is abstract. The soul, an abstraction, is represented in a concrete manner. It is evident that art and religion are conjoined from primitive times to the present.
Religious art is a display of the ever changing concept of what is beautiful. The concept of the beautiful that inspires the art of a period is derived not from the abstract concept of soul but from the concretization of that concept.
Religious art concretes the abstract idea of soul and thereby makes the soul convincing; it creates something tangible and lasting of a concept as it moves down from generation to generation by a mystical verbal tradition that became fixed only later.
"This close association, in fact fundamental identity, of art and religion, each of which strives in its own way to make the absolute eternal and the eternal absolute, can be already seen at the most primitive stages of religious development, where there are as yet neither representations if gods nor copies of nature."
Quotes and ideas from "Art and Artist" by Otto Rank
Now does the title "From immortality to abstraction to soul to religion to art" make sense?
Suppose you tell us what you think Becker's answer would be.
fresco wrote:Suppose you tell us what you think Becker's answer would be.
Becker is a tuff read. I am constantly required to turn elsewhere to follow his thinking. Aesthetics is an important concept for Becker but I was unable to comprehend his meaning when he used the concept and therefore I turned to the books.
Becker referenced Otto Rank and thus I borrowed Rank's book from my favorite library and have begun reading. This very morning I have found the thread that will lead me to Becker's meaning; this morning was one of those eureka moments when I found the thread that will lead me to my understanding that set me onto that book. I shall post my understanding; the first installment is coming in my new post this morning.
Rank's theories of art are a remarkable testament to the influence of Wagner on Austro-German intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of what he writes about art are either paraphrases of Wagner or designed to explain Wagnerian aesthetics. The very pairing of art and religion is partly borrowed from Wagner's Religion und Kunst (1884).
This partly explains why Rank's theories of art work less well for non-German, non-Romantic repertories. (They don't even really work all that well for Wagner, if Rank's psychological analyses of the Siegried and Lohengrin myths are any indication.) Rank's theories of art are often couched in sweeping, universal terms--itself a trademark of German-Romantic aesthetics--and, like most philosophical or intellectual approaches to art, rely on vague notions of "the Artist," as if there were only one kind.
If one were to look at Italian or French opera in the 19th century, for example (i.e. the repertoire that Wagner was at first indebted to and later tried to resist), one would see that the concept of beauty had very little to do with expressing the soul of the composer. In Italian opera especially, the composer wasn't even a particularly singular component in the artistic process--he was just one more cog in a hierarchy that usually privileged the libretto over the music. One would be hard-pressed to say what Aida tells us about Verdi's soul.
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