Feb 222 min read

The Absolutely Random in Art

By Anastasios Paraskevopoulos

Absolute beauty in art excludes ugliness, and ugliness excludes beauty.

Thomas Mann said about the ugly: 'Ugliness creates hatred,' and I add that beauty creates happiness. But we also submit to it and feel the need to acquire it.

But one more reason for the beautiful is the enigmatic character and understanding should be seen, also the absolute mastery of the Artist over the materials, that is to tame them, just as the writer shows his mastery over the language. The same happens in photography, where the photographer becomes the master of light and shadow, but also in the play of these two.

This is exactly how admiration is created in art: when you tame something but it is not seen, when the viewer sees the effect and not the cause, when the viewer is unable to interpret what is presented to him not in his eyes but in his brain because the eyes are a tool that conveys the image to the processor called the brain, and in this way, the happiness of knowledge is created.

Thus, it implies a kind of realization of the spirit in the work of art, a clearly definable idea of the work faithfully oriented towards aesthetic experience than one would expect from Kant's more modern ambition to understand art driven by its inner constitution rather than from the outside constituting it subjectively.

Not all existent things are spirits, but neither are they beautiful nor are they art, but art is something existent that with its morphological arrangements acquires a spiritual character, the same is a counterweight to the doctrinal obtuseness of the so-called aesthetic realism.

The element of the spirit is not something ontologically present in any work of art, but it is in every work something happening, forming; the spirit of the work of art is part of a more general process of exhalation.

Sculpture by Anastasios Paraskevopoulos