Art Moralizes Nature — Nature Demoralizes Art

Beauty is a property of things perceived by humans, who can judge and evaluate abstractly. And since beauty is considered to be a culmination or perfection of specific qualities or characteristics, there is also ugly, the deficiency of those qualities. But these qualities are socially valued. Remember: there are no ugly things "in Nature."

Artworks embody, make concrete in one way or another, these qualities of beauty and thus isolate them, as it were, from the demands of utility, so that beauty, grace, radiance, quiddity even, can be contemplated. That's what Aristotle means by  catharsis and vicarious violence.

Because artworks do not need to be denotatively truthful—because works of art are fictions, because they do not have to have a utilitarian purpose, because they are free creations—the maker can concentrate on the accidental qualities of appearances in order to manipulate the degree to which beauty or formal wholeness or another property can exhibit itself.

Art moralizes nature. The artist takes the visible qualities of things as his model and forms and arranges them in the work of art in such a way to produce an order to these qualities. Canons and rules and guidelines and other prescriptions are the socializing of the raw, unordered, un-beauty and un-ugly of nature, the making of preferences for and against ways of perceiving these qualities. Art is a social endeavor, and by being social, it subjects its materials (the stuff of Nature) to the mores of the group, of the society. Art moralizes nature, imposing preferences on colors and shapes and forms that, in the wild, occur for other reasons and purposes.

And Nature, which precedes art, is indifferent to these moral rules of Art. From time to time, Nature rebuffs art, Nature supersedes art, Nature is superabundantly more than art, defeating the rules of art: There are no binding canons of portrayal in Nature. Ultimately, Nature demoralizes art—i.e., Nature de-moralizes art.

Art moralizes Nature. Nature demoralizes Art.

Consider the Preposition

This subject first arose in an on-line email list discussion about art and aesthetics, specifically on the point of how concepts are predicated. Another person argued that the common practice in English of saying "X is Y" ran afoul of many difficulties (instantiation, reification, etc.). 

These conversations led me to ponder how we develop our sense of predicating qualities on some named subject, and that led me further to think of how we use English idiomatically, almost without noticing it, to create shades of distinction in our expressions. Ultimately, I began to think about prepositions and their near relatives, the adverbs that are used with verbs ("run down a fact," "speed up the process," etc.) which has long lost its literal meaning (down, up) and now conveys only a conventionalized meaning.

Language historians tell us that our modern prepositions evolved from these adverbs used in this way. [Paul Roberts, Understanding Grammar, New York: Harper & Row, 1954, pp. 227-228.]

But there is still the matter of how we come to know what "up" and "down," "over" and "under" and the other prepositions (adverbs) signify. As a small child learning the language, our mother or father might have put a toy ___ the table and said, "The toy is on the table." Next, they might have moved it ___ the table and said, "The toy is under the table." And this would have gone on and on until we grasped the relationship they were demonstrating. 

How did we get from "on the table"—a position—to "this goes on and on"?

On this blog, I want to consider the preposition, and to consider how we think about representations, on one hand verbal and internal, and on the other, external and often visual.

I will come back to this specific topic in a separate, longer blog. I will also include here essays and musings about visual art, language, and other matters that arise from culture and society.