Poetry, Sublime, Arete:A Study on Artistic Publicness

Aesthetic snobbism comes from a recent trend in contemporary aesthetics that has overemphasized the newness. Lyotard's aesthetics of the sublime criticizes the ideal of Kant's aesthetics that pursues harmony and totality, and tries to keep its distance from the disaster of fascism having plagued the last century. Treating every attempt at representation as evil, he takes a point of view that the excellence(arete) is the only newness bringing about ruptures to harmonious form and any representation. Therefore, the art of the sublime appears as two kinds of activities:ironist activity and prophetic activity. Aesthetics of the sublime forbids both to lead to activity constructing a new life, since it is conceived as pursuing harmony and totality. I think, however, that we must not restrict the role of the art of the sublime only as announcement of disaster. The task to construct the new forms and relations of life also is the part and parcel of art, through which it can proceed to the area of publicness. Thus, it is more appropriate that the art of the sublime is defined as performing of 'aesthetics of movement', the point of which is 'trans-borders'. The activities of trans-borders appear not as the repeated presentations of impossibility of presenting the unpresentable, but as infinitely possible ways of presentation. If the activities of trans-borders is defined in such a way, whereby do we have the feeling of the sublime coming from frustration of imagination? The borders of art imply time and space of here-and-now, and through intrusion into such time and space, art can prove its possibility of new presentations beyond artist's imagination, the anonymous excellence of works of art. In this sense, we can say that two moments are inherent to works of art. The one is that when the works of art appear in the space where we can never obliterate the publicness, they increase their possibility of presentations. The other is that, as they appear, the space as such is changed and the new artistic publicness can be realized.