Art is that which seizes you, the viewer. It’s what grasps you in that moment. It does so by invoking an emotion. That emotion exists across a spectrum and that spectrum has two opposite poles, beauty and terror.
The first, beauty is quite explanatory. It’s the harmonious quality one feels when looking at something that is aesthetically pleasing. It’s that feeling of reverence we might have for the works of someone like Michelangelo or Da Vinci. What we are witnessing is the perfection that we wish we could have in our own lives. Longing and sadness are bound to this feeling, because it is something that cannot be obtained.
The Japanese have a phrase for this, mono no aware. Meaning the pathos of things, it expresses the Japanese tendency to recognize the transitory and ephemeral nature of life. That is beauty. Beauty and art are all transitory and impermanent.
And this beauty, it comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s expressed in perfect symmetry, exquisitely executed lighting, or delightful prose. It may even be obliquely erotic, because this sense of beauty also informs our choice in sexual partners.
Which that’s it, this experience of beauty and terror, is an erotic one. It may not cause something as literal as physical arousal in the viewer, but the emotion behind it is bound to Eros the Greek god of sensual love and desire, and also the pleasure principle.
So too is terror, for it’s true that we when we look upon art whether pictorial or cinematic that is horrifying, (the horror film is a prime example), there is a pleasurable quality, that is bound to a feeling of awe, a feeling of terror.
Awe is an emotion related to both beauty and terror. But it is in terror that we feel it at its strongest. It’s the fear we feel, the tantalizing sensation that overcomes us when we read a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. It’s the feeling of suspense we experience when watching an Alfred Hitchcock film. And it’s also the dark attraction we feel for certain characters, monsters like Dracula, Hannibal Lecter, or even Satan himself.
But is something that provokes terror beautiful? Yes it can be. Not always, but what else do we feel when we read the work of someone like Dante? His inferno is utterly vile, but so consummately described that it is a beautiful work of art. The variety of punishments and the way they poetically correlate to specific sins, the whirling mass of souls caught in their agony, and Satan in his hellish glory, can we not say that Dante’s technique in describing these events is beautiful?
I say we can. Technique that is masterfully implemented is beautiful. Art that provokes a response that I have no control over, whether pictorial, literary, or musical is beautiful. It fails when there’s no response, when there’s indifference and even when there’s hate. Every artist’s purpose is to provoke an erotic response in his viewer. If he or she fails to do this than the art has not connected.
There are several reasons why this can happen. Perhaps it’s not to the viewer’s taste, which in that case, this is something the artist can’t control. No matter how excellent your piece may be it will inevitably fail to connect to some.
So then where do we judge?
We can try to judge based on how well it has connected to viewers, we can do this by mere numbers, how well it has done commercially, but this doesn’t do it justice. Which leaves one to ask, can we objectively judge art at all?
Art is unknowable, a paradox, as mysterious as creative inspiration, as chimerical as life itself.
And this is what makes it so beautiful and so terrifying.