Sensual Aesthetics... & other oxymorons
The Pope wrote, in "Love and Responsibility" that
"Beauty is essentially an object of contemplative cognition, and to experience aesthetic values is not to exploit: it gives joy...Thus, sensuality really interferes with apprehension of the beautiful, even of bodily, sensual beauty, for it introduces a consumer attitude to the object: 'the body' is then regarded as a potential object of exploitation."
Mark of Particulae writes:
An obvious and good example of this is our sexuality. Art can appeal to our sexuality in a manner that is wholesome or harmful and a "lowering of standards" in art is not so much a matter of the object being "too low" so much as the use and interpretation of the object being jejune, inappropriate, or foolish.
I've always wondered at how, concretely and in practice, art can appeal to our sexuality in a wholesome way. Maybe it appeals in a very broad or subtle sense. For many, including Ham of Bone and I (we've had many discussions on it) the sensual huddles in the corner and is quite adept at spoiling any potential aesthetic experience that remotely concerns the sexual. Call us jejune, but not late for dinner.
President James Garfield said that "something went out of him that never came back" after seeing so many men killed during the Civil War. That something he said was a "sense of the sacredness of life". Perhaps in a similar way one can never get back a way of looking at sexuality in a wholesome way after abusing it.
Sensuality creates hunger, aesthetics creates appreciation. At the St. Louis Art Museum I found myself in that familiar spot of lurching from the sensual to the aesthetic even though it was a 'fine art' museum. I suppose the fault lies, dear Brutus, not in the stars...
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