L'art pour l'art

Reading Gauthier this summer (the man, poet, writer, and super écrivain who is probably most famous for coining the expression 'l'art pour l'art' or "art for art's sake") I came to a number of startling conclusions about myself as an artist and an enjoyer of art. Firstly, although I have been profoundly moved by works that seek to convey a message, politically or other (the Russo-Israeli photgrapher, Jonathan Tordovnik and his show INTENDED CONSEQUENCES about children borne from the Rwandan genoicide comes immediately to mind), that sort of work does not seem to bear the same immediacy as art that is viewed as an end in and of itself.

In his novel, La Captaine Fracasse, Gauthier utilizes the "cloak and dagger" intrigue cliché perhaps made more famous by his contemporary, Dumas, as a skeleton onto which he grafts fleshy layers of profound poetry and precise words. Unlike the modern aesthetics which often seek simply to entertain on a lower level, or provoke on a "higher level," Gauthier weaves a tapestry of words and ideas that exist in, of, and for themselves and entice the reader to enter a pantheistic world where the inanimate is imbued with life.

Reading this novel, some of his poetry, and subsequently beginning the brilliant, Roman de la momie, I have come to realize the aesthetic of poetry exists within a moment, a moment during which the poet is a seer able to view what is behind the curtain of "reality" to glimpse and later display what exists behind this veil. As Rimbaud writes "je suis poète. je veux me faire voyant." This is the highest level of art, the ability to see and transcribe beauty, which seems to have been lost in our world of immediacy and superficiality. I am reminded of Keats' famous verses "Beauty is truth, truth beauty ,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

In my theology, beauty is paramount, it is the Essence (in the Platonic sense) that supercedes the others, at least in my own perception and it is because of that that I am committed to art for its own sake; beauty as social justice, if you will. This is an idea I hope to continue exploring during this coming year of Jewish texts, musical performances, and poetry.