Because I have admired the Spanish philosopher and art critic José Ortega y Gasset (1883 – 1955) for many years, I have been reluctant to review any of his books. His writing style offers a peculiar angle of vision on culture, philosophy and art. As a result, for years I have been a consumer, always taking his work and never returning anything.
But now it’s time to give something back. So here are some very personal likes and dislikes.
The title of Ortega’s book -The Dehumanization of Art- is now a constant in music, literature, aesthetics and philosophy, having come to mean that in postmodern times mimicry (representation of the human) is irrelevant to art.
According to Ortega, the arts do not have to tell a human story; art should be concerned with its own forms, and not with the human form. The essay, divided into 13 subsections, was originally published in 1925; In these short sections, Ortega discussed the novelty of non-representational art and sought to make it more comprehensible to a public very numb to traditional art forms.
A search for the substance of traditional art
In the first section entitled “Unpopularity of new art”, Ortega extracts from his political creed what can be said to be elitist, aristocratic and anti-popular. His analysis concludes with the belief that some people are better than others; that some are superior to others: “Behind all contemporary life lurks the deep and provocative injustice of the assumption that men are really created equal.”
That uncompromising political point of view colors his aestheticism.
The masses, he maintains, will never understand the “new art” that was emerging with Debussy and Stravinsky (music), Pirandello (theater) and Mallarmé (poetry). Lack of understanding will mobilize the masses – a term that Ortega frequently uses to refer to ordinary people – to dislike and reject the new art. Therefore, the new art will be the art of the illustrious, the educated and the few.
Bringing that kind of divisive tool – few against many, aristocrats against democrats – to the arts seems not only narrow-minded, but also disingenuous. However, my main objection to Ortega’s analysis and conclusions is more fundamental. In my opinion, “understanding” in the arts is of secondary importance. The arts are created by humans to reach out and touch other humans by appealing to their passions and emotions, through their senses.
When I was 14 years old, I accidentally heard a musical composition so different and strange to my young ears that it prompted me to call the radio station to find out about it. It was Appalachian Spring, a ballet composition by Aaron Copland. What 14-year-old from the Andes (Peru) can be familiar with ballet or Aaron Copland to even begin to understand composition? However, I liked it. And that’s all that mattered to me.
Understanding that piece of music, or even knowing the composer’s name, was as far from my mind as Einstein’s theory of relativity, since I had no idea who Einstein was either. Delight, enjoyment and ecstasy that one feels without express understanding.
By exalting new forms and promoting avant-garde artists and their efforts to produce non-traditional art, Ortega’s book had a significant influence on the rejection of realism and romanticism. So seductive and compelling was Ortega’s prose that many artists and critics began to equate both realism and romanticism with vulgarity.
Allowing a brilliant writer to wield so much authority should be a sin. Ortega’s authority has bothered me for years. Yet despite that internal annoyance, my respect for the man’s writings kept me from protesting. So, by stripping Ortega’s dazzling prose of its seduction—by “bracketing” and performing a phenomenological reduction—we can see it in his own nakedness for what it is: an elitist and noxious point of view.
People should never be ashamed of their likes, likes, and dislikes in art. We should enjoy that touch of aesthetic delight whether it comes from Primitive, Greek, Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque, Realism or Romanticism, Surrealism, or any era or movement.
Ortega advocates for the “objective purity” of the observed reality
Following Plato’s division of reality into (universal) forms and their simulacra, Ortega invents his own corresponding terms: ‘observed reality’ and ‘lived reality’.
The representation of real things (lived reality) -man, house, mountain- Ortega calls them “aesthetic frauds”. Ortega totally dislikes objects, whether man-made or natural: “Much of what I have called dehumanization and disgust for living forms is inspired precisely by this aversion against the traditional interpretation of realities.”
Instead, the representation of ideas (observed reality) is what he sees as true art. Therefore, he praises the new art as destroying appearance, likeness, likeness, or mimesis. In this destruction of the old human forms of art lies the “dehumanization” of Ortega.
However, it must be remembered that more than 2,500 years ago, the pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras said: “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that are, and of those that are not, that are not” . .” Ortega’s will to “dehumanize” art will always crash head-on against Protagoras’s wall. Art by definition -anything made by man- is profoundly human and cannot be otherwise, despite Ortega.
Even on the stark canvases of painters like Mark Rothko one feels the humanity of the artist in search of the human soul through color and light. Even in the random drops of Jackson Pollock’s works you can feel the man’s struggle for freedom. And what is freedom if not a human aspiration?
Conclusion
Every time I look at early African art forms, Paleolithic images of animals in the Lascaux caves, or even Mondrian’s colourful, balanced grids, I am awed by the human spirit. And in those moments I feel that labels, signs, marks and explanations and descriptions (theories) are totally unnecessary.
What we need are theories of art that can unite people instead of dividing them. Ortega’s “dehumanization” is a toxic theory not because he advocates hateful elitism, but because he tries to deny ordinary people the pleasures of art.