Art and Civilization as Rasa

To hear it told by today's bourgeoisie pseudo-intellectual "consumer of art" or liberal arts school graduate whose "career" consists of producing material for museums and galleries (art for arts sake--dead art--as opposed to art for the sake of culture, race, religion or even man--living art), one would come to think that the highest form of art is the most earnest exhibition of expression of oneself.

This near unanimous cultural meme is entirely modern. It disregards elements which represent and reflect primordial truths, formulaic comprehension through iconographic and symbological communication, or anything founded on or supported by tradition. As such it is entirely alien to meaningful or empowering connections to the natural and cosmic cycles which make up the physical and metaphysical worlds and is thus limited to novelty and commerce.

In such an environment the artist must posses the sort of prophetic genius which births religions, foresees the creation and perseverance of new races of humanity, perpetually sees Nature as theophany, etc. in order to produce anything of real or lasting value. Therefore this modern impulse towards the exhibition of individualism ultimately alienates and divorces one from the very qualities which formulated the substance and principals of their very being, the qualities the artist wishes to express, and leaves them trapped in an inferior world of eternal becoming, unto death.

Ananda Coomaraswamy puts it thus:

It has been well said that civilization is style. An immanent culture in this sense endows every individual with an outward grace, a typological perfection, such as only the rarest beings can achieve by their own effort, a kind of perfection which dose not belong to genius; whereas a democracy, which requires of every man to save his own "face" and soul, actually condemns each to an exhibition of his own irregularity and imperfection, and this implicit acceptance of formal imperfection only too easily passes over in to an exhibitionism which makes a virtue of vanity and is complacently described as self-expression.

An ethno-culture or race, in this point of view, honed and sculpted by generations of cultural and genetic aesthetic ascendency towards "typological perfection" through the traditional teachings descendant from the Fathers of ethnicity and founding prophets of religion, includes all individuals involved from the lowest to the highest caste in the most powerful and profound example of archetypical expression. This far transcends the "vain exhibitionism" of modern dead art, and in the light of such comparison reveals modern "art" as a truncated, spasmodic and schizophrenic parody of true art and, in fact, no art at all.

According to Coomaraswamy's rendition of the Sahitya Darpana:

Pure aesthetic experience is theirs in whom the knowledge of ideal beauty is innate; it is known intuitively, in the intelectual ecstasy without accompaniment of ideation, at the highest level of conscious being; born of one mother with the vision of God, its life is as it were a flash of blinding light of transmundane origin, impossible to analyze, and yet in the image of our very being.

(Quote: Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art, Dover Publications pp 36-37)

Shayne