Kant and Tolstoy

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Kant and Tolstoy

• Art as Judgment about a Form
• Or
• Art as Infectious Emotion

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Vermeer Woman in Blue
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Vermeer Woman Reading a Letter
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Andres Serranos Piss Christ vs. A Medieval
Cruxifix
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Kants Aesthetic of Communicable Pleasure

• Disinterested InterestAn Appeal to Taste
• A Public SentimentWe Share a Judgment
• Purposiveness without a Concept of PurposeThe
  Rose is without a WhyBeauty
• Expression of Feeling rather than of a
  ConceptForm not Subject

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Tolstoys Aesthetic of Communicating Feeling

• By means of perception, I can feel the same
  feelings as another who expresses them.
• Art infects us with feeling.
• Almost all of life involves the activity of
  artjokes, lullabies, mimicry, clothing,
  utensils, religious icons, stories, speeches etc.
• Not beauty but human communion through feeling.
• Art is dangerousbetter that all art be banished
  than all art is tolerated.

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Four Versions of the Annunciation

• Fra Angelico ??
• Leonardo DaVinci
• Sandro Bottecelli
• El Greco

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From Figurative to Abstract

• Vermeer
• Turner
• Klee
• Abstract Expressionist Artist
• OKeefe

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Self Portrait by Rembrandt

• The power of the canvas to emulate a gaze.
• The mystery of the artist who, through a
  painting, gazes from outside at his own gazing
  from within.
• Who is looking at whom, as Rembrandts persona,
  his painted likeness, looks out from the canvas?

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The Place of the Sublime?

• That which overwhelms our capacity to respond
• Not strictly aesthetic for Kant, since the
  sublime undermines contemplative judgment and so
  the beautiful
• The genre of Horror is that of the sublime

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Horror in Persona and SWF

• Horror is the excitation of our sense of the
  uncanny, (german unheimlichnot at homeness)
• In the uncanny we find either a) we have become
  other to ourselves, totally outside of who we
  are or b) the other outside ourselves has
  possessed us from within
• The familiar is made absolutely unfamiliar, or
  the unfamiliar is made absolutely familiar.

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Persona

• The word Persona suggests a mask, that ones
  identity is a play act, a role.
• The horror of flickering lights on a screen
  becoming a world we are absorbed in. For
  Bergman, simply viewing a film is horror.
• The viewer struggles to determine who is real and
  who is not in the film.
• The two characters are in a struggle about being
  possessed and being dispossessed. But the viewer
  ends up implicated in this struggle. We do not
  know with which figure we should empathize.
• Elisabet possesses Alma, even as Elisabet finds
  herself dispossessed of her life.

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SWF

• Ally is possessed by Hedra, as Hedra adopts
  Allys styles of clothing, hair and gesture.
  Hedra even finds a boyfriend who looks like
  Allys boyfriend.
• Conversation in no way works as it did in
  Personato unveil or hide deep secrets that
  threaten to undo the lives of the two
  participants.
• The possession of Ally come from without. Ally
  is never overwhelmed from within. The possession
  is not uncanny but consumptive. Allys life is
  being enjoyed by, eaten up by Hedra
• The viewer never questions with whom to have
  empathy. The film is about Allys struggle with
  Hedra, the outsider. The outsider never violates
  Ally from within.