17th
Newman once famously quipped that artists had as much use for traditional aesthetics as birds did for ornithology. Of course, this was infamously and shamelessly recycled much later by the combative and acrid physicist Richard Feynman, who said the same thing about philosophy of science. I feel bound to point out, to myself and anyone who reads this, that Tom Wolfe was absolutely correct: Modern Art had made itself a slave to the false, but clear idea (Descartes’ fixation), but it had caused itself to disapparate up its own vortex into nothingness. Body disappeared; all that mattered was the idea/theory: art is geometric, art is flat, art is abstract, art without walls, art without picture frames, and finally, art without art, written on postcards, ideas or photographs. This revolt against the body is not peculiar to the West, but its particular modulation and obsessive memes are. Soon, technology and its slave, society, will begin to manifest massive repressions against body (which is actually aimed at the soul, since the two are inseparable). From medical problems all the way to inhuman and infernal machinery, the war on body/soul has only just gotten started.
What would the Inklings say? It is against this that they struggled…
