Donald Kuspit, Quote Machine

Donald Kuspit, Quote Machine

Calvin Trillin once wrote of advising his friend R.W. Apple to donate his expense accounts to The Smithsonian, so laden with extravagances and excesses as they were.

Motivated by a similar concern for posterity's interest in the excessive I hereby nominate the following passage by Donald Kuspit from his book The End of Art for most authorities quoted in a single paragraph:

"According to Pater and Greenberg, aesthetic experience is heightened sense experience, separated from all other experience. It is inherently beautiful and affords pleasure. This was also the view of antiquity. In Plato's Philebus Socrates states: 'Thus pleasures are those which arise from the colors we call beautiful and from shapes; and most of the pleasures of smell and sound....such sounds as are pure and smooth and yield a single pure tone are not beautiful relatively to anything else but in their own proper nature, and produce their proper pleasures.' In the Tusculan Discussions, Cicero writes: 'There is a certain apt disposition of bodily parts which, when combined with a certain agreeable color, is called beauty.' St. Augustine agrees, using almost exactly the same words in On the Kingdom of God (xxii, xix). The idea survives in modern philosophy. Thus, for Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Idea (1818), the pleasure of beauty arises from 'disinterested...sensuous contemplation.' As the phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne writes, 'the being of the work of art yields itself only through its sensuous presence, which allows us to aprehend it as an aesthetic onject.' Meaning is 'immanent in the sensuous, being its very organization.' More complexly, but in a related way, Hegel, in his Aesthetics (1835), writes: 'art has the function of revealing truth in the form of sensuous artistic shapes and of presenting to us the reconciliation of the contradiction [between sense and reason, between what is and what ought to be, between desire and duty]. Consequently it contains ifs end in itself, in this very revelation and presentation.' The beautiful work is one in which this aesthetic reconciliation seems inevitable. As Hegel says, 'the greatness and excellence of art...will depend upon the degree of intimacy with which...form and subject-matter are fused and united.' " (pp. 34-5)

-Benjamin Harris