An invitation to cherish the romantic’s ideals
Finding our sensitivity
When it comes to art, people not only value the representation of the artwork by itself. It goes beyond that.
Seriously, we could make a possibly never-ending list about this. From feelings to a particular expression, a symbol, or maybe even the trigger for certain social changes. Art can express anything. Actually, being honest, how could it not be like this if art has been the narrator of humankind’s history.
Following this idea, it is by far certain that humanity has given art the task of painting this often dismal world. To make it meaningful, blissful, or simply enjoyable. And even though this objective may seem an exaggeration, it makes total sense that what we consider aesthetically pleasing has such weight worldwide in society.
Igor Stravinsky once said that “music is incapable of expressing anything”. Let us take a brief moment to digest this idea.
I don’t know about you, but there is no possible way for me not to agree with this composer. Moreover, I believe this to be actually true in regards to art in general. Let us rephrase it to leave it like this:
“Art is incapable of expressing anything”.
Undoubtedly, art has walked several paths alongside human history. Through art, we have portrayed the horrors from massacres, uncountable love stories, the beauty of the human body, and even political or social issues.
Hence the importance of having artists in society, because not only will they represent a particular moment of humanity, but an escape from reality.
However and retaking the aesthetics concept, the way that society understands this, and the way the artist engraves himself in his art has changed over time (as expected).
In the contemporary world, aesthetics is nothing but the product that is going to be commercialized. Therefore lacking emotional depth and richness. Often, modern art is just senseless emotionally speaking, but highly valuable in terms of money.
This ladies and gentleman is the aesthetics of today: capitalism.
Indeed we are now finding value through art’s economical worth rather than the emotions evoked by the artist or the art piece by itself. Gilles Lipovetsky considers in his book “L’esthetization du monde” that contemporary/modern artists don’t have the will to live surrendered to an idea -even if poverty must be tolerated, but they have the hunger of finding a lucrative profession that has social approval as a perk.
Taking this into account, it is no longer fundamental for the artist to get in touch with himself, to explore his emotions, to understand his feelings. Say no more. As part of the industrial transition we suffered as humanity, art transitioned from something emotionally intense to something economically dense.
Romantic’s aesthetics and artists ideals
Romanticism has always been interesting for me. Although the moment that this movement caught my attention in an astronomical way was when I first read “The sorrows of Young Werther”. What a masterpiece. If you have not read this book, it is definitively a must when talking about romantics, their emotions, and passions.
In this book, I found that Werther single-handed everything to fulfill his emotional desires. He did not care about the mishaps of the body as long as he fed his heart and soul.
Anyways, my interest in the romantics was growing so fast that I did not notice when I was already listening to their music, reading their texts, appreciating their paintings, and so on.
There is something hypnotizing about this period.
As a consequence of this hunger for knowing what else did the romantics lived, I took the opportunity of having history of art, particularly in music, as one of my optative courses at my University.
Over the course of last semester (autumn), we made an approach to the most important artistic eras. But honestly, the one that continued to captivate my heart was undoubtedly romanticism.
Let me explain the reasons why.
Firstly, one must say that Romantics were actually living their own feelings and passions after a monarchic era, where the king determined what was beautiful and what is not (Shakespeare, Bach, MichaelAngelo). In his book “La música como experiencia de reflexión y desarrollo integral”, Alfonso Luna states that the romantic artists were analyzing their feelings to communicate them freely in their work.
I don’t know about you, but this is my idea of what being an artist should be.
Romantics were reckless in regards to this. Because -at the beginning of this particular movement- aside from their own feelings and passions there was nothing more important for them to capture in their art. And you know what, it makes total sense to me.
Think about it. You are used to having the monarchy deciding which pieces from which artists are considered aesthetically pleasing. Thus the aesthetics of older people is basically monarchical. However, the romantics are different, because what was considered to be aesthetically pleasing during the romantic period was now more democratic.
There is this story that happened to Wagner (he’s considered as one of the most important romantic composers) before deciding to dedicate his life to music. The story says that Wagner, while still in law school, went to listen to Beethoven’s 9th symphony without knowing that by the end of that hour, he would be convinced that he needed to dedicate his life to music.
I seriously cannot imagine that happening with any song of a contemporary top artist. No joke.
Additionally, it is highly important to point out that even if romanticism was basically divided into two periods (early romantics and late romantics), both were focusing on this exploration of the self. To give more context -and focusing exclusively on early romantics, we see that in the beginning artists were completely focused on exploring themselves and their passions.
This derived mainly from the fact that prior to romanticism, the aristocrats or even the king were the ones deciding what pieces of art were aesthetically pleasing. Never the artist. Thus having the opportunity of finally exploring what they wanted to do and not what was pleasing to the crowd was there.
Afterward beautiful things happened such as Beethoven or Brahms in music, as Allan Poe or Goethe in literature, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche in philosophy, etc.
All of these people were tired of “absolute truths” that were given back in the day. This is the main reason why they focused on finding meaning through themselves and their emotions, what they were passionate about. Again, this is precisely what Gilles Lipovetsky considers as one of the main characteristics of the romantics.
Just to make it clear, is not that contemporary art lacks emotionality, it is not this. Rather we often forget what once was being an artist as well as the beauty found within the passions of oneself.
To quote one of my all-time favorite movies (a.k.a. Death Poets Society), the English professor, Mr. Keating, tells his students: “we don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
We must recover this sense of exploring ourselves as artists, as those who are willing to sacrifice their economic wealth for actual meaning.
