Dehumanizing for profit
What is it the majority of people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in their minds when they “like” a work of art; for instance, a theatrical performance? The answer is easy. A man likes a play when he has become interested in the human desires presented to him, when the love and hatred, the joys and sorrows of the personages so move his heart that he participates in it all as though it were happening in real life. And he calls a work “good” if it succeeds in creating the illusion necessary to make the imaginary personages appear like living persons. In poetry, he seeks the passion and pain of the man behind the poet. Paintings attract him if he finds on them figures of men or women whom it would be interesting to meet. A landscape is pronounced “pretty” if the country it represents deserves for its loveliness or grandeur to be visited on a trip.
It thus appears that to the majority of people aesthetic pleasure means a state of mind which is essentially undistinguishable from their ordinary behavior. It differs merely in accidental qualities, being perhaps less utilitarian, more intense, and free from painful consequences. . . . As they have never practiced any other attitude but the practical one in which a man’s feelings are aroused and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental intervention leaves them without a clue. . . .
I will not now discuss whether pure art is possible. Perhaps it is not; but . . .even though pure art may be impossible there doubtless can prevail a tendency toward the purification of art. Such a tendency would effect a progressive elimination of the human, all too human, elements predominant in romantic and naturalistic production. And in this process a point can be reached in which the human content has grown so thin it is negligible. We then have an art which can comprehended only by people possessed with the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility—an art for artist and not the masses, of “quality” and not for hoi polloi.
That is why modern art divides the public into two classes, those who understand it and those who do not understand it—that is to say, those who are artists and those who are not. The new art is an artistic art.
José Ortega y Gasset, “The Dehumanizaton of Art” (1925)
June 19, 2007 1:59 PM
