On Creating Meaningful Art

vealing itself to the world through history. Absolute beauty, or the “ Platonic Idea,” he explains, has been on a journey to reveal itself more fully through the various art forms beginning with symbolic art, moving to classical art, then to romantic art, and finally to modern art. And even within the arts, the Idea has progressed to a fuller expression of itself as it moved within the arts from architecture, to sculptures, to paintings, to music, and finally to poetry. Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy is robust and fairly complicated, but simply put, it gives fuller insight to Percy Shelley’s claim that the poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world. Thanks to Kant and the Romantics, the world has been given broader, more helpful definitions with which to treat fine arts and its manifestation of the beautiful. Though these two influential views on aesthetics will likely never be reconciled, or completely synthesized, they can be helpful in seeking a higher subjective standard for art in the former case, and a higher objective standard for it in the latter. The problem is, however, because they cannot be reconciled, neither of them provide an absolute objective standard (in the sense of absolute truth and without bias) on which to build a viable conceptual basis for beauty and the fine arts. On this point, they both fail. They also fail to provide any insight into the reasons for some of the modern trends in art, though Hegel did foresee the arts being liberated from religion and becoming entirely secular. In any case, he was onto something in that regard. The more modern concepts of fine art, i.e. either of Pablo Picasso’s The Three Musicians or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans appear to affirm Hegel’s prophecy in that they seem to challenge all of the traditional concepts of beauty. Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica acknowledges concerns about the boundaries of the definition of fine art:

But this, the commonly accepted account of the matter, does not really cover the ground. The idea conveyed by the words “love of beauty,” even stretched to its widest, can hardly be made to include the love of caricature and the grotesque; and these are admittedly modes of fine art. Even the terrible, the painful, the squalid, the degraded, in a word every variety of the significant, can be so handled and interpreted as to be brought within the province of fine art. A juster and more inclusive, although clumsier, account of the matter might put it that the fine arts are those among the arts of man which spring from his impulse to do or make certain things in certain ways for the sake, first, of a special kind of pleasure, independent of direct utility, which it gives him so to do or make them, and next for the sake of the kindred pleasure which he derives from witnessing or contemplating them when they are so done or made by others. 23

While the article does raise the issue at the heart of the controversy in theory, it would seem the idea of a “special kind of pleasure” implies there are now new questions to ask. Should art be reduced to the pleasure one receives from creating something? When a craftsman completes the construction of a high-quality chair, for example, certainly there is aesthetic satisfaction in some measure. But

23 “Fine Arts,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 10, Slice 3: “Fenton, Edward” to “Finistere”, March 12, 2011, accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35561/35561-h/35561-h.htm#ar209.