ART AS LUXURY

This is probably a good time to distinguish two oftentimes confused types of art: art as a skill and art as an aesthetic creation. Here is what Schopenhauer has to say on this subject, in his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, ii:

“The mother of the practical arts is need; that of the fine arts is luxury. The father of the former is intelligence and of the latter genius, which is itself a kind of luxury.”

I must clarify Schopenhauer’s distinction in two ways. When I say “art,” especially in the Sonnets section, I obviously mean aesthetic arts, produced by a genius, rather than by an intelligent practitioner. This is not to say that all practical things are artless and all artistic things are useless. There is no clear separation line between utility and beauty, as the latter is a transcendent quality, and it can permeate the real world without a distinction made on the utilitarian basis.

The other point I would like to make, with regard to Schopenhauer’s aphoristic statement, the word need is also ambiguous. The artist creates not because he can, but because he must, as Bulwer-Lytton splendidly says it about genius, and here we are witnessing an artistic necessity, that is, need of a somewhat different quality than the utilitarian need, or an endeavor in which social or individual usefulness is the object.

Thus, there is a need and a need, but it is easy to guess what Schopenhauer has in mind. What needs to be further clarified in his dictum, though, is the meaning of “luxury.” Without much ado, we can safely say that luxury in this context is the opposite of the poor man’s “bare necessity,” a transcendent quality “not of this world,” whatever it means, a grasshopper’s art, rather than an ant’s craft, alluding to the classic fable. In that Aesop/La Fontaine/Krylov fable we encounter an essential conflict between Schopenhauerian practical art and fine art, with the latter turning out a tragic loser in the ant’s down-to-earth court of law.

But in the higher court of human civilization our daily needs do not count. History will never remember the pragmatist ant for being so well-prepared to survive the winter. The artist grasshopper/dragonfly may have perished in that winter, but its “song and dance” will have a far better chance to vitare Libitinam, and enter the sanctum sanctorum of world culture and human historical memory, than any “sensible” effort to provide for the elementary survival of the species…