Ceci n'est pas un blog.

Humor me while I share this nerdy excerpt from The Levinas Reader. This first paragraph of an otherwise arduous essay is, I feel, an excellent definition of art in the postwar period.

"It is generally, dogmatically, admitted that art is expression, and that artistic expression rests on cognition. An artist -even a painter, even a musician- tells. [S/]He tells of the ineffable. An artwork prolongs, and goes beyond, common perception. What common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition. Where common language abdicates, a poem or painting speaks. Thus artwork is more real than reality and attests to the dignity of the artistic imagination, which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute. Though it be disparaged as an aesthetic canon, realism nevertheless retains all its prestige. In fact it is repudiated only in the name of a higher realism. Surrealism is a superlative."

-Emmanuel Levinas, "Reality and Its Shadow" 1948

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-9

"Surrealism is a superlative." I. Love it. The Magritte fits so well...

Levinas goes on in a rather controversial direction after this lovely little diddy, claiming, very much in line with Kant, that a work of art is positioned outside of experience as a resemblance of reality. As a mere 'shadow' of reality, art escapes the temporal and exists as an interval, in an interval. The time of art, therefore, is not REAL time, and thus the shadow non-being of art is different from our ('our' meaning natural life) REAL being. All of this I can understand, all of this is relatively logical and fair enough, but it is what this suggests that makes Levinas' ideas controversial. Indeed, if art exists outside of the real, it is disengaged from the real and thus art no longer has anything to offer the real. An art that exists beyond reality has nothing to teach in the real world.

(Levinas tries to amend this dismal conclusion by suggesting that the art critic bridges the gap between the real and art, claiming that criticism makes human the inherent inhumanity of art. Certainly, this suggestion of human dialogue with works of art, which he claims persist as a fixed monologue, seems contradictory, but whatevs.)