How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization by Mortimer J. Adler

Author:Mortimer J. Adler [Adler, Mortimer J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 0812694120
Google: CkfBvAsOjYwC
Amazon: B003S3RL3K
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2000-03-02T08:00:00+00:00

FINE ART AS SPECTACLE

I’d like to deal in the closing minutes of today with one final question. And that final question I could almost say in these words, “What good is beauty? What human role, what human significance do works of fine art, which are things of beauty, have in our lives?” Now my answer to that question, “What contribution do the beautiful things produced by the fine artist play in our human life?” is in terms of a distinction between action and contemplation. Let me say that another way: we are at any moment in our lives either actors or we are spectators. I’m using the word action and spectatorship as the opposed words that perhaps are a little more clear than the more difficult word contemplation. And what works of art do for us, what works of fine art which are things of beauty do for us is they make us spectators. They give us that pleasure of spectatorship, giving us relief from the urgencies and exigencies of actions, giving us rest from action. This is their great human contribution, that they give us freedom from the day-to-day pressures and needs and utilities of our active life. They make spectators out of us.

But when one looks at the fine arts this way, as making us spectators, one has to say of them that they are all of a certain sort. They are all spectacles. And I would use another word; being spectacles, holding our attention as spectators, they are all entertainment. From the point of view of the sociologist, not from the point of view of the person who is concerned with one fine art, but from the point of view of the sociologist it is perfectly proper to say that all the fine arts have something in common with entertainment and spectacles in general. That what a parade does, what a prize fight does, what a ballgame does as a low form of entertainment is exactly the same ultimately as what a great work of fine art does. To say this is not to degrade the fine arts but merely to say that the fine arts play a role in human life at the high level that simple entertainments and spectacles play for mankind at the lowest level of human appreciation and enjoyment, the level, the function of making spectators and giving us a rest from action.

Actually, in a democracy we are concerned with a hierarchy of the arts, or let us put it this way: with a hierarchy of entertainments. We have all grades of people, all grades of sensibility. And it is perfectly proper to say that simple and low forms of entertainment--I mean low in the sense of uncomplicated and easy to appreciate--belong to and are needed by a large public just as much as, for those with very refined and cultivated sensibilities, the highest and most subtle works of art are needed. In this hierarchy of entertainments, if you will, there is a

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