The Mortal Hand
Are there concrete criteria for recognising high-quality art?
Dear Anoniem,
I must express my regrets and happiness that there exists no rigid criteria for defining the essence of high-quality art.
Immanuel Kant has extensively written on this subject, in my humble opinion, simply too much. Too much, because not only language about art is just a poor metaphor for the essence of art itself; Kant seems to drown in his own words without ever reaching the bottom. But more importantly, if someone discovered the divine laws of naked beauty, I would personally exile those laws to the depths of hell.
Sterile dissection, finding a pure recipe for beauty, means the death of secrets. It means the murder of curiosity. It means the fragile point where our sensitive soul turns into that of the soldier, whose heart eternally embraces the grave. When art is locked in the kingdom of logical laws, it means the mortal wound to the human soul.
This observation is not grounded in unjustified paranoia, but grounded in the sharpness of actuality. We live in modern times, times are changing and the anthropocene reveals its big lies. Humans are on the edge of falling into the web of mechanical breath, and we are absolutely not ready for this. But there's hope, there is hope in the resilience of art.
Until now we tried to order art, only to witness this ordering collapse. Then we tried to reorder it again, only to witness that we ourselves collapse. The untamed power of art is a confession to the fact that we never fully coincide with ourselves, always something in between, something unresolved in our hearts. It's a wonderful thing and the most powerful antidote to the stupidity of man.
Therefore art is not only a confession of the raw honesty of the strange heart, but art is a war. A rebellion against the spell of anonymity, a rebellion against the sacrifice of the human soul. And oh, how I hope art always remains the revenge of the moral hand.
So dear Anoniem person, I think there is only one single way to find criteria for recognising art. Go into yourself. In art, we sometimes discover that the closest people are the most far away from us. This is because art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known- a possession no one can take from you. So defining what art is for you is inexpressible for me…
Love,
Coma