Alexandrianism - Beauty and Cruelty

STUDENT:

If you cage beauty you’re caging mankind and its imagination.

TEACHER:

I'm glad you took the time to read and think about this post. There is a lot in it to digest, and most of it in far from easy to digest. In very large measure this is because so much of the post deals with Oscar Wilde, a late-Victorian figure who, in his own inimitable way, was one of that society's most incisive critics.

Whereas most social critics will attack a society for its hypocrisy, it inability or refusal to do what it means and mean what it says, Wilde instead attacks society in terms which are precisely the opposite. It is not society's hypocrisy which offends Wilde but rather it's wretched excess of sincerity. Everything, for the Victorians, was so achingly, stiflingly earnest. It is the unrelenting morality of the Victorians - their belief in good honest work, and art which is sturdy and meaningful - that Wilde finds so absurd. All aspects of art, according to the Victorians, must be subordinated to good ends, must reflect purposeful labor.




Ford Maddox Brown
Work, 1865

In place of this imperative profundity, Wilde substitutes a view of art which calls for complete superficiality, perfect irresponsibility - both of which vices are transformed into the new "virtues". Wilde's is indeed a world were it is more important to be beautiful than good, more important to be glamorous than substantial, more important to be idle than active. The name for this perspective on life is aestheticism, a sensibility and total lifestyle often referred to as "decadent". Aestheticism is based in the belief that life should be lived as art, and that the only things worth doing are things done purely for their own sake, and purely because they are beautiful. If it takes the suffering of others to allow me to live gorgeously, so be it; or, all the better! This view of things in no respect seeks to cage beauty. Or, if it does cage, bind or shackle beauty, it is only to make it all the more intensely beautiful. Aestheticism fully accepts the fact that the radical liberation beauty - the very highest ideal - may well require the generous application of cruelty. According to this view, precisely because the Beautiful has, for so many generations, been held captive by the Good and, later, by quasi-religious political-economy of the Useful; art must be pruned and polished until it is free of every last unnecessary accretion and imperfection. And though it may strike you as odd, one of the very last, and most persistent of these blemishes is Thought.

One may not choose, in the end, to be an aesthete. The price may seem to high, or the very thing may seem repugnant. Indeed, modern art and modern art criticism arose as a strong reaction to Wilde and his cult of the gorgeous and the futile. Modern painting and sculpture, for instances, established themselves as no longer interested in beautiful results but rather in productions which offer direct evidence of the plastic activity of the Mind. Still, even if we reject Wilde's cultivation of pure Futility as perverse and built upon sadism and the enslavement of others, it nevertheless offers us a valuable view into the culture of Utility, which after Wilde can only appear to us as in large measure built upon masochism and the enslavement of the self.




Michelangelo
Dying Slave, 1516