Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art - Why Exhibit Works of Art? > Status Update

For example, the Aristotelian doctrine that " the general end of art is man " was firmly endorsed by the mediaeval Christian encyclopaedists ; and we may say that all those philosophical and religious systems of thought from which the class thinker would most like to be emancipated are agreed that both ethics and art are means to happiness, and neither a final end.

Industry without art is brutality. Art is specifically human. None of those primitive peoples, pastor present, whose culture we affect to despise and propose to amend, has dispensed with art ; from the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological.

" The sword," as Rumi says, is the same sword, but the man is not the same man.

As Meister Eckhart says, " the craftsman likes talking of his handicraft " : but, the factory worker likes talking of the ball game!

No real distinction can be drawn between aesthetic and materialistic; aisthesis being sensation, and matter what can be sensed.

knowing that his work will be carried on by another representative.

and whose faith in the eternal values of " personality " is so naive ; hard to explain to ourselves, who shrink from the saying that a man must " hate " himself " if he would be My disciple." The whole position is bound up with a .traditional view that also finds expression in the doctrine of the hereditary transmission of character and function, because of which the man can die in peace,

There is another aspect of the question that has to do with z patron rather than the artist; this too must be understood, if we are not to mistake the intentions of traditional art. It will have been observed that in traditional arts, z effigy of an individual, for whatever purpose it may have been made, is very rarely a likeness in the sense that we conceive a likeness, but much rather the representation of a type.

Our sentimental or aesthetic culture sentimental, aesthetic and materialistic are virtually synonyms—prefers instinctive expression to the formal beauty of rational art. But Plato could not have seen any difference between the mathematician thrilled by a beautiful equation " and the artist thrilled by his formal vision.

For things are made normally for certain purposes and certain places to which they are appropriate, and not simply " for exhibition "