Publisher's Synopsis
Arguing that modern aesthetics has divorced art from beauty and therefore from life itself, a renowned philosopher seeks to reintegrate art and everyday experience.
Supposedly there is a distinction between art and life, such that one can at best imitate the other. Alexander Nehamas, one of most respected philosophers of his age, makes clear just how far we have been led astray by this false dichotomy. He argues that art can only diverge from life when we scorn beauty, which connects and adorns the two.
Art, Interpretation, and the Rest of Life takes as a starting point Plato's attacks on poetry and drama. Subsequent generations reinforced his contempt, and during the eighteenth century institutionalized it in an asserted distinction between high and low art. It was this elitist move, establishing a realm of cultivated sensibility accessible only to the educated, that resolutely severed art from experience. Instead art was imagined independent of everyday interests and popular concerns, so that aesthetic pleasure was alienated from the hopes and disappointments of life as we generally know it. Central to the conceit of modern aesthetics-and conceit it was, for the trifles of one age are often fine art in the next-was the divorce of art from beauty: beauty provokes the desire and discontents that have no place in an intellectualized order of high art.
Attending to the likes of Goya, Proust, Duchamp, Mann, and Nabokov, crime novels and TV shows, Nehamas reintroduces art to beauty so that we may find art everywhere and see it for what it is: not an esoteric stimulation for the few but an integral and multifaceted component of all people's lives.
