The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton Paperbacks, 128) [Paperback]

Anyone interested in Modernist aesthetics will want to have this book. Ortega y Gasset,as he does in all his books and essays, captures the historical progression of ideas better than anyone else of his generation. Whether your interested in Modernist art or poetry(European or American), this book will help to elucidate important intellectual currents and better able you to challenge and explore many of the underlying philosophical and aesthetic constructs that influenced Ortega y Gasset's "generation[s]"

Ortega y Gasset was not just another philosopher. He's a thinker that raised philosophy to the level of art. As such, his analysis of art is a work of art by itself. His insights into aesthetics are overwhelming and inexhaustable. This book is not just a book about art; it's a vast meditation on modern human condition. Before one reads any art criticism one should read this one so that one will taste the truth of the art. Ortega y Gasset writing reminds us that contemporary art critic is so dull and out of touch with its subject. After reading Ortega's book one would have difficulties reading any other art critique.

This book contains five essays. The first is called "The Dehumanization of Art." Basically, the author says that art is just art or at least this is what the conclusion modern artists have reached. Art is merely a form of play and magic, having no real connection to the real world. It is a thing apart from reality, an expression of imagination.

This point of view surprised me in that I didn't expect Ortega y Gasset to subscribe to it. His view of art does not appeal to man's need psychologically to have his values projected on a large canvas, movie screen or novel. He seems to agree that dehumanization in art is a good if necessary and inevitable. His view is also restricted to painting, so what he says about art, dehumanized or not, is very narrow and is contradicted by his views of the novel as art.

This essay gave me a clearer idea of how modern art theorists think about modern painting, although I was not convinced that the paintings by Poussin, for example, or Titian, are therefore merely patrician and false because of the inarticulate theories of modern artists' vision of painting.

Ortega y Gasset's essay, "Notes on the Novel," I liked very much. For me, this was the outstanding essay in the whole book, largely due to my preference for ideas on the novel. Ortega y Gasset seems here to have an understanding of the novel as it is, as novels have been produced in time and in history, not as a work produced through some theory or as viewed by some particular theoretical model of what the novel ought to be. HIs view of the novel as a prison was the single, most touching insight that this essay provided. How this prison-like effect is created was also a fascinating piece of intellectual importance in the study. He says that this prison-like effect in the novel is produced by "an immense agglomeration of detail." (T.C. Boyle anyone?) "Or trivia."

I think Ortega y Gasset is absolutely correct in this assessment. For what is a novel without its details?

I liked the philosopher's evaluation of Dostoevsky's novels as having "the form of life," that his characters do not act like his descriptions of them, just as persons in reality do not act in accordance with our impressions of them. I think Ortega y Gasset might have been implicitly referring to the epistemology of the normal or average person here.

Too, I felt that the author's emphasis on the daily life in the novel was warmingly accurate of my own experience reading a novel. He says that the treatment of the daily life of its characters is what makes the novel what it is. His examples, given as proof of the daily life in the novel, were Proust's "Remembrances of Things Past" or "Wilhelm Meister" by Goethe or novels by Balzac . That the author added that the novel is typically big and sluggish, unlike a poem, for instance, was astonishing to me because of its obviousness and simplicity of truth. I had the feeling while reading this essay of discovering the strange in the familiar.

Finally, I was impressed and relieved to learn that Ortega y Gasset claims that a minimum of plot or action is important to the novel. He himself finds that the characters, ensconced in their daily lives, ensconced in the immense agglomeration of trivia, is alone sufficient to keep them imprisoned in the novel and that plot's purpose is to provide the reader some interest by which to contrive to see and to attend to the characters' lives. Thus, too much plot is merely clever and forces one outside of the novel's prison. A novel is thus provincial and sluggish. It favors the inner life for contemplation. Action is necessary but minimal. A novel is full of atmosphere, minuteness, dailiness.

The essay "On Point of View in the Arts" focuses on painting, on the evolution of perspective and vision in painting. His views were refreshing to me. I could "see" the evolution he depicted from Giotto to Cezanne. This evolution has to do with proximate vision and distant vision, a movement from the external foreground to the internal background. What the author helped me to see astonished me.

"In Search of Goethe from Within" was a prolix essay, disturbing, confusing and desperate. Basically, Ortega y Gasset indicts Goethe for having disavowed his "I" for Goethe's refusal to see he was a shipwrecked man. What was confusing was the author's equation between vocation or career and self. The point the author wants to make in this essay is that man is shipwrecked and he must make himself in the midst of danger, uncertainty and contingency. But just how Goethe could have become himself and just how man goes about becoming himself was only hinted at in this essay. Ortega y Gasset seems guilty of idle casuistry here with this essay -- for all that is unclear and confusing in the concepts he uses.

In the last essay, "Self and Other," the author makes a pitch for man withdrawing into himself for purposes of contemplation and greater survival. He sees the modern world as split into two factions: those who seek contemplation for contemplation's sake, apart from action and survival. These are idealists. And the other faction are those who seek action, apart from contemplation. Ortega y Gasset sees the connection between thinking and survival but just what is the nature of that connection, what is the means of its maintenance and continuity, and how to determine whether one has made the connection, Ortega y Gasset does not say or even hint at an answer. He is against ideas as culture, as a value in and of themselves if considered apart from man's survival. He recognizes that ideas are dangerous and many of them are blatantly false. But how to unify thought and action, how to discover what in culture is valuable in man in terms of his survival, Ortega y Gasset does not examine in this essay. Thus, this essay had the effect of sporting an opinion without substantive proof or explanation.

204 pages