Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    In Art as in Life
    In Art as in Life
    In Art as in Life
    Ebook107 pages1 hour

    In Art as in Life

    By Ilario Colli

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Described as “a major achievement for any writer” and having “the potential to become one of the seminal works of our time”, Ilario Colli’s bold first work, In Art as in Life ventures into territory few modern culture theorists dare to cover. Learned yet imminently accessible, In Art as in Life delights with its sumptuous language and its profound ideas.

    Its effortless navigation through 1,700 years of literature, music and the visual arts leads the reader to a startling conclusion: the contemporary Postmodern aesthetic, like the moral relativism that spawned it, is not – as it’s often claimed to be – a sign of a robust, self-confident creative culture, but rather the primary artistic symptom of a metaphysically ailing civilisation; one still recovering from the demise of moral absolutism and still struggling to find meaning in its wake.

    What people have said about In Art as in Life:

    “In Art as in Life would represent a major achievement for any writer. It contains numerous ideas of genuine originality, the likes of which we rarely come across. I believe it will prove a real contribution to the wider understanding of our culture.”

    - Robert Gibbs, former publisher, Limelight Magazine


    "An outstanding achievement for a young academic…possessing a superbly crafted argument.”

    - Dr. David Symons, Professor, University of Western Australia School of Music


    “…conceptually original and profound, and exquisitely well written.”

    - Dr. Victoria Rogers, Professor, Edith Cowan University


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFulton Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 15, 2021
    ISBN9781646549689
    In Art as in Life

    Related to In Art as in Life

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Searching For Sense Amid Chaos

      Sep 28, 2023

      EVER SINCE THE POLITICAL STRATEGIST Steve Bannon mentioned, vaguely and dubiously, “Julius Evola and different writers of the early twentieth century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really kind of eve

      4 min read

    • Article

      All Sweetness And Light

      Nov 24, 2022

      All Sweetness And Light
      8 min read

    • Article

      Sebastian Milbank

      Oct 31, 2024

      Sebastian Milbank
      6 min read

    • Article

      We’re Naturally Supernatural

      Jan 5, 2023

      Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities Jeffrey J Kripal University of Chicago Press 2022 Hb, 256p, £28, ISBN 9780226820248 As a young Catholic, Jeffrey Kripal visited some Protestant churches in his American Mid-West town. He was baff

      11 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Feb 15, 2021

      Early in the autumn, we issued a rare call for pitches that didn’t lead with a theme, giving our communities and contributors a chance to have a say in shaping the next issue in a time of such trenchant irresolution. In response, we heard meditations

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Return Of The Pagans

      Dec 25, 2023

      The Return Of The Pagans
      7 min read

    • Article

      Michael Wood On…

      Sep 1, 2022

      In my job, travelling the world making films on history and culture, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring religion in its many manifestations. Religion, after all, is a gift for the camera: full of colour, action and often moving rituals. It’s also a c

      3 min read

    • Article

      What Is The Grail Message?

      Jan 31, 2020

      THE THREE VOLUMES of In the Light of Truth contain a total of 168 lectures whose contents, building upon one another, give a picture of Creation in entirety. The Author’s all-embracing view is based on well-known natural laws, which reveal the hidden

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lewis The Prophet

      Oct 26, 2023

      ON 22 NOVEMBER 1963 — A FRIDAY — John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died within hours of each other. Sixty years on, it is surely Kennedy and Huxley who are most remembered as men who saw the bend of history’s arc: JFK the radical ref

      8 min read

    • Article

      Varieties of Experience

      Sep 1, 2020

      THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local cult

      4 min read

    • Article

      Know Your Philosophers

      Aug 2, 2020

      Know Your Philosophers
      4 min read

    • Article

      Evolution The Big Liee

      Oct 2, 2020

      Evolution The Big Liee
      4 min read

    • Article

      Trust

      Sep 3, 2018

      Kari Cwynar: In her short text in this issue, poet Lillian Allen writes, “I remember a time when a person was as good as their word as a societal norm.” We asked Allen to write a short definition of “trust” – inspired by the anecdotal yet radically p

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Writer Turned Mystic

      Jan 27, 2020

      The Writer Turned Mystic
      5 min read

    • Article

      Around The Web

      Nov 7, 2020

      The categories of Image, Word, Orientation and Action constitute the main divisions of the Warburg Institute Library and encapsulate its aim: to study the tenacity of symbols and images in European art and architecture (Image, 1st floor); the persist

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Irreplaceable Human Voice: Louise Glück Gives Form to Devastation

      Jun 11, 2018

      As a Buddhist priest, I find in Louise Glück’s American Originality words for an increasingly bewildered and besotted country—a series of meditations on poetry’s power to orient, understand, heal, celebrate, and preserve the self’s “Individual, irrep

      7 min read

    • Article

      Brave And Barmy New Worlds

      Jun 24, 2021

      Brave And Barmy New Worlds
      4 min read

    • Article

      Change

      Oct 28, 2019

      Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both? One aspect of the parall

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Schlock Of The New

      Sep 22, 2021

      Have you noticed that, as a group, prophets tend to be a grumpy lot? From Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah, right down to Carlyle, Ruskin, Spengler and beyond: gloominess and bad weather as far as the eye can see. There are many reasons for this, beginni

      3 min read

    • Article

      News From Nowhere

      Nov 6, 2017

      News From Nowhere
      3 min read

    • Article

      What Is The Grail Message?

      Nov 1, 2021

      THE THREE VOLUMES of In the Light of Truth contain a total of 168 lectures whose contents, building upon one another, give a picture of Creation in entirety. The Author’s all-embracing view is based on well-known natural laws, which reveal the hidden

      2 min read

    • Article

      News From Nowhere

      Jan 23, 2018

      News From Nowhere
      4 min read

    • Article

      OK Doomer: Why Spengler Matters

      Apr 27, 2023

      PERIODS OF UPHEAVAL ALWAYS bring their own prophets, divining doom or salvation for those around them and for the world at large. We have our fair share today, with various tellers of dire fortune warning of imminent environmental apocalypse, technol

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Obi Kaufmann

      Dec 20, 2021

      My library is not a collection of precious objects but of precious, thoughts-made-real. My library is not the safe-box repository for western culture. These are not sacred texts; this is digestible material that amounts to food. The post A Year in R

      8 min read

    • Article

      CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE

      May 31, 2018

      CONSCIOUSNESS v CATASTROPHE
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for In Art as in Life

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      In Art as in Life - Ilario Colli

      cover.jpg

      In Art as in Life

      Ilario Colli

      Copyright © 2021 Ilario Colli

      All rights reserved

      First Edition

      Fulton Books, Inc.

      Meadville, PA

      Published by Fulton Books 2021

      ISBN 978-1-64654-967-2 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-1-64654-968-9 (digital)

      Printed in the United States of America

      Table of Contents

      Part II: A Critique of Postmodern Relativism

      In Art as in Life

      "In Art as in Life would represent a major achievement for any writer. It contains numerous ideas of genuine originality, the likes of which we rarely come across.

      I believe it will prove a real contribution to the wider understanding of our culture."

      —Robert Gibbs, former publisher, Limelight Magazine

      Colli has an outstanding and probing intellect…He has an exceptional command of language.

      —Victoria Rogers, Associate Professor in Musicology, University of Western Australia, School of Music

      I can see that Colli is a master of English language communication. He ought, quite clearly, to be Australia’s leading classical music critic.

      —Robert Matthew-Walker, Editor, Musical Opinion

      In Art as in Life represents a stimulating work-out for the mind of the creative artist as well as students of thought and culture.

      —Nicholas Bannan, Associate Professor of Music, University of Western Australia, School of Music

      Introduction

      The common truism, Art imitates life, runs deeper than we usually think, and those who use it flippantly utter a truth much deeper than they realise. The aesthetic values informing the creation of art in any given era form a relationship so intimately symbiotic with the metaphysical values running chronologically alongside them, that, with practically no exceptions, the history of Western arts has seen a perfectly parallel evolution of the two, with all major metaphysical developments producing—with a delay of, at most, several generations—directly correspondent alterations in the manner and spirit in which art is delivered, received, and signified.

      In the current age, this symbiotic relationship is as strong and palpable as ever, and its effects as all-encompassing. The contemporary moral climate in the West can, without exaggeration, be described as one of near total relativism. A thinly disguised cognate of nihilism, which is its immediate forebear, relativism posits that, since there are no universal values, no eternal and immutable Truth, each truth is as valid as the next, and consequently no moral system can hold supremacy over another.

      The historical forces that led to this present position were relentless and inexorable and have yielded an equivalent spirit of relativism governing the conception of art, which in academic circles goes by the name Postmodernism. Like its ethical counterpart, Postmodernism argues in the ultimate absurdity of absolute ideals. Art can provide no window into the Truth, because Truth doesn’t exist, and any attempt to capture it is, at best, misguided, and at worst, obtuse and heretical. Beauty—that highest and noblest of human truths, which until the early twentieth century, it was the primary objective of Western Art to humbly serve and glorify—is now a concept blurred and diluted. In the name of a self-deceiving confusion of ideas that parades itself as anti-dogmatism, what is universal is universally denied and what is noble is routinely confused with what is base and ugly. The artist—who, though often innovative within the restricted confines of his form, has in all eras been a hapless slave to the thought currents outside it—gleefully buys into this self-deception, producing Art that makes a mockery of the noble. The artist who, status quo notwithstanding, sets about using his form to convey universal Truth and Beauty, puts himself at odds with the establishment and at risk of critical derision.

      With the following piece, I attempt to illustrate that the contemporary postmodern aesthetic, like the moral relativism that spawned it, is not—as it’s often claimed to be—a sign of a robust, self-confident, creative culture, but rather, the primary artistic symptom of a metaphysically ailing civilisation, one still recovering from the demise of moral absolutism and still struggling to find meaning in its wake.

      Part I: A History of Beauty

      The Middle Ages

      Before the advent of twentieth-century Postmodernism, Beauty was not a flexible concept. It was neither easily amenable to change nor susceptible to individual quibbles regarding its fundamental nature and purpose. It was incontestable as a fixed quantity, though not necessarily agreed upon unanimously in its details. It was employed almost uninterruptedly as the guiding aesthetic principle in the creation of Western Art from the days of its medieval infancy. Beauty, as it was conveyed through the artistic medium, was invariably put to use in the service of that one, supreme governing principle; that value of all values, eternal and immutable, the ideal par excellence, which itself legitimated Beauty, and rendered meaningful all attempts to pursue it: god.¹

      In the medieval conception, man, though created in god’s image, partook of none of his divine energy. He and god stood at opposite ends of the cosmic spectrum. While man was firmly planted on earth, god dwelt far above him, in heavenly realms remote and inaccessible. A helpless creature who rarely lived beyond fifty and was constantly threatened by illness and other scourges,² man could do no better, in this life, than submit himself to the divine will and could expect to have no more decisive a hand in his own destiny than that granted him by god through prayer.

      In his City of God, St. Augustine (AD 354–AD 430), arguably the most influential medieval theologian, divides the cosmos into two distinct realms that have more than a hint of Platonism about them: the City of Man and the City of God. These two cities, Augustine argues, were formed by two different forms of love—the former by the sinful love of self, even to the contempt of god, the latter by the love of god, even to the contempt of self.³ Though the meaning Augustine assigns to his two cities shift about throughout the work, a literal interpretation is readily available. The City of God is the ideal Christian utopia, a society whose inhabitants place god first before each other and even themselves; a city governed by Caritas or a pure and selfless love for god. The City of Man, on the other hand, is one overrun by sin and vice; one whose inhabitants put their base, selfish needs first and live their lives, not according to the spirit, but according to the flesh.⁴ Augustine’s point is this: if we are to achieve salvation, we need to act, in this life, like an ideal citizen of the City of God, avoiding all sins of the flesh and directing our attention away from affairs of this world toward those of the next.

      In the major philosophical works of the period, there are a number of similarly human-effacing themes. The most important, perhaps, is the limitation of man’s reason and his consequent reliance on god’s Truth for salvation. For St. Augustine⁵ and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274),⁶ man’s innate faculties for independent reasoning were, at best, flawed and, at worst, spiritually deadly.⁷ To follow one’s own inner logic while ignoring one’s faith was to lead oneself into falsehood and, if one was especially misguided, to damnation.

      The story of Adam’s fall served as the ultimate cautionary tale against the perils of depending on human reason. In the Garden of Eden, god had given Adam and Eve everything they could possibly need: peace, happiness, companionship, and his constant love and protection. All they had to do in order to remain in this blissful state was to abstain from eating the fruit of the tellingly named tree of knowledge. The fruit, here, represented the pernicious lure of free thought and scientific curiosity, which god deemed unnecessary—after all, in a perfect, divinely ordered world, where faith rules supreme and all questions have preconfigured, divine answers, what need could there be for independent inquiry? By plucking the forbidden fruit, they sent god a clearly defiant message: that his divine utopia wasn’t enough for them; that faith wasn’t enough for them; that god wasn’t enough

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1