DAY 332

PHILOSOPHY OF ART

Modern Aesthetics

CELEBRATING HUMANITY

“Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual.” —Friedrich Schiller

Society and the individual—that’s what the modern era was all about. After millennia of submitting to the mysteries of supernatural authority, people began to believe in their own superiority. The arrival of the Renaissance in the 14^th century was the dawn of mankind’s trust in itself. Thus, humanism and naturalism were born under the veneer of enlightenment. These ideologies had faith in the human brain’s ability to discover all truth through the natural world.

During that time, humankind’s rationality was also celebrated in the art world. Finding inspiration in the realism of classical art, artists like Giotto di Bondone began to use lifelike perspective in their work. Later artists like da Vinci and Michelangelo meticulously studied the human body and represented its form in astonishing detail.

Exceptional progress in science and technology led many philosophers to cherish their own rational abilities and reject traditional notions of divinity; hence the ideas of people like David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche. Eventually, however, the fixation with reason and cold machinery provoked reactions of Expressionism and Romanticism, where an apparent nostalgia for mystery rekindled imagery of passion and the sublime.

Finally, after it seemed like art had been dissected from every angle, the slippery slope of innovation dropped into the foggy seas of Postmodernism, where categories break down and subjectivity reigns supreme. —CKG