Full Love

Phrases and Philosophies on Beautiful Art

The free-play of the imagination and our understanding of, which is our agreement with, a piece of Art is the most sublime example of how beauty pleases us. Our imagination is left free to relate to the form while our understanding is left free to accept the creative play at work or not.

We must have only an emotional attachment to Art. Judging it within the confines of right and wrong is an ignorant practice for Art inherently denies such binaries.

He who experiences a piece of Art must be devoid of all interest in the object i.e. free from any interest in the existence of the product itself. It should merely be a disinterested pleasure. Consider, for example, the unicorn, the Pegasus, or Wilde’s green carnation… Our appreciation of Art is therefore not a logical or cognitive judgement but an aesthetic one. It is the content, not the form, which is important. That is all.

Art has its own inherent purposiveness, as with nature which has two. Nature has an objective purposiveness i.e. we can understand, through experience, what it is doing. For example, we know that a plant grows upwards to reach the light to photosynthesise. The other purposiveness is that everything in nature is unique; we know, through the laws of nature, that no two plants are the same. It is this individuality that is essential to beautiful Art. Beauty is distinctiveness; it is flawed. Thus, beauty is the consciousness of the pleasure we gain from our insight into one’s imagination (Art) and our sound understanding of it.

Beauty to Art can be an accessory but not necessarily its main component. Art is an aesthetic idea (something which may or may not be rational) but it can also be a method of exhibiting a sensible idea, rationally. It has in it the ability to serve a higher purpose; for revolution, for change. Art is, after all, the communication of ideas.

Art is a site for the rich interplay between genius and taste; it can be soulless. Surrealism, for example, is no less capable of revealing a hidden or poetic truth than Realism.

Art works on three levels:
Nature is beauty
Art is our attempt to capture that beauty
And thus what we have is an emotional or intellectual response to that attempt.

All art is immoral.

La Folie

My God Is Blue

Some madness was involved in the making of Sébastien Tellier’s latest opus My God Is Blue. So much so that its entire marketing seems built around it. Just how many records implore you to join a religious sect led by a randy Gallic troubadour? And indeed you can hear the madness amongst its 12 tracks. To surmise, it was to be part Use Your Illusion part The Wall and, in true fashion, what Tellier's delivered is something unlike either. For My God Is Blue is a record of joyous little contradictions, sung as it is in multiple languages. Produced by Ed Banger hip-hop alumni Mr Flash, it has none of the abrasiveness which the label has become known for, nor will you find any meticulously crafted club ‘bangers’. It turns out to be an awfully shrewd move; with Bousquet’s bombastic bravura lending itself well to Tellier’s teary mysticism. ‘Russian Attractions’ is a perfect case in point, with an introductory synth line that recalls Destiny's Child’s ‘Survivor’, it still manages to nestle itself comfortably between a set made almost entirely of whimsical balladry. It would look, on paper at least, to be an unfathomable failure - but somehow it works.

Perhaps most preposterous of all (or "mad," shall we say), was the claim by the man himself that this was his ‘mature’ coming-of-age album. Don’t be fooled; Tellier's still very much up to his old tricks here. The spirit animating the whole set is one of farce; with Tellier counseling its absurdity through a pandemonium of arm-waving choruses, unscripted solos, and wry serenity. However, such cartoonishness is nonetheless dealt with very very seriously. Even when Tellier's head is in the clouds and his mouth's full of pie. Being the chameleonic contrarian that he is, Tellier is also a gifted and imaginative musician whose powers lie in precision and command of space. With My God Is Blue those powers have never felt more refined. Without being indecisive or unclear of his musical persona, Tellier manages to satisfy in both pensive pieces and active workouts; successfully bridling the classical with the modern.

‘Cochon Ville’ is a celestial synth-pop number and one of the few examples of an actual groove on the set; in a year which has seen the passing of so many of disco’s seminal originators, it’s good to know the genre is mutating in good hands. Yet for all of his musical channel surfing, the eccentric Parisian still enjoys a solid album concept; 2004’s Politics was about just that, while his last was 2008’s sensual odyssey Sexuality. This is a most satisfying conclusion to the triptych; for all the talk of madness, it would seem more than ever that with God Tellier knows exactly what he’s doing. ‘Come stand up and feel fine’ - you may just have to succumb.

Olimpiadas

XVII/VI/MMX



When Oscar Wilde arrived in the United States aboard the SS Arizona back in 1882, he reputedly told a customs officer that he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” When Sebastian Horsley arrived in 2008, he humbly acknowledged that he had “nothing to declare but Oscar Wilde’s genius,” before being promptly sent back home to England. Whilst on tour promoting his memoirs, Dandy in the Underworld, Horsley - who is perhaps best known for having himself crucified in the name of “beauty” - was denied entry into the U.S. on grounds of moral turpitude: a wide net that encompasses everything from fornication to simply being a public nuisance. And whilst crimes of fashion are not normally deemed qualifying acts, the customs incident is believed to be incited by Horsley’s appearance of top hat, three-piece suit, and nail polish. His reputation had indeed preceded him; the bon mot voyage may have been cut prematurely but the triumph was all Horsley’s… “I am the only thing of value in this country and I am removing it immediately.”

After Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), the dandy author became somewhat synonymous – or rather notorious – as being a champion of socialism and ‘friend of the People’. By the publication of Horsley’s ‘unauthorised autobiography’, however, he was no longer such an enthusiastic preacher. Horsley was far more concerned with the melodrama of life; too titillated by the lurid back alleys, the prisons and the brothels he haunted. He loved the masquerade of his daily fare just as he did the exposure to society’s nocturnal underworld. The Regency once held scorn over the bourgeoisie for its relationship between the fashionable ‘high’ and the criminal ‘low’; one class that esteems itself above the law, and the other that finds itself too frequently below it. Yet Horsley recognised a likeness in their libertinism and made himself a welcome guest at both parties. He had entered The Harlot’s House and found a home away from home.

‘My tastes are to the tacky and tasteless. I like the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the low-brow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the under-privileged, the exclusive clubs of the excluded masses. I waltz through life with one foot in the grave, the other in Woolworth’s.’

Every anarchist dandy has crumbled into his own ruins and so Horsley’s fate was perhaps inescapable. Like the sunflower with which the dandy identifies himself, Horsley’s impulsive radiance heralded an equally sudden collapse at the age of 47. It is believed that how a man dies shows his true character as much as how he lives. If that be so then Horsley’s end was rather apt; he died of a heroin and cocaine overdose, alone in his Meard Street flat (a brothel in all but name). There is no such thing as innocent or mischievous pleasures. There are only pleasures. That is all. 

Horsley did not want to be a man; he wanted to be a mannequin. His life was a performance in search of an audience and now, the first anniversary of his passing, he has achieved that aim. Now he has become a work of art.

Casablanca

This Must Be The Place

One of the trends on display at last year’s Cannes festival was of EuroAmerican mash-ups that were to receive varyingly felicitous receptions. Not least so was Paolo Sorrentino’s return with This Must Be The Place: a road trip movie featuring Sean Penn as an aged rock star-turned-Nazi hunter, set, for the most part, in Ireland - for absolutely no reason whatsoever. 

Having kept himself in hermit-like retirement for two decades, Penn’s Cheyenne - an overgrown oddball somewhere between Robert Smith, an old lady, and a fey adolescent – finally rouses himself in a bid to track down the concentration camp guard who served as his late father’s enduring obsession. This is a tale of catharsis and redemption, just as Sorrentino’s earlier works have all been in their own way, with atonement for the pain of the past being sought in the unlikeliest of places. 

It is a picture that seems to have first been guided by a simple premise, of a displaced Cheyenne coming home to his family and facing his own personal, and musical, demons. That Sorrentino then interweaves a plot of loss, revenge, and the Holocaust (not to mention a frankly jolting cameo by David Byrne) is something of an absurd miracle. As it stands, This Must Be The Place is a baffling, oddity of a movie; enough of a curiosity item, perhaps, to secure its future cult status.

M.T.V.

Morrissey

It is the modus operandi of all dandies to be deeply contradictory. If they are flamboyantly decadent and fashionable, they are also reviled and insufferable. And with his fastidious devotion to style and culte de soi-même, Steven Patrick Morrissey has undertaken the role no differently. He has played the glamorous and the gauche, the pop star and the anti-pop star, the outspoken celebrity and the reclusive introvert, the aesthete and the icon of ordinariness.  He has single-handedly popularised the creased brow, and second-handedly affirmed that a wit that transcends all else is still no criterion for decency. A bastion of l’étranger; his is the voice of the healthily deprived, and the healthily depraved.

And yet, to say that Morrissey is your traditional dandy would be an injustice to both parties, for it belies the ‘carnivalesque’ side of his persona, which is at once in tension with his dandyism and yet equally essential to his vocal style. While his verse is nimble, melodious and plangent there is also a reflexive protest involved in its delivery. His baroque ululations dip and swerve in search of an alternative strategy for communication. That distinct, operatic yodelling being a desperate attempt to express his interiority without language; it is, ultimately, the sound of feeling straining to communicate itself unclothed; primal and pure. This carnivalesque spirit is also apparent in his manhandling of language; in his bold stretching out of words, far beyond their customary length or shape, and squashing of words and syntax into conventional spaces of popular music.  And what beautiful words they are... Even those which would most rather be spat. Borne out of complete physical necessity, they tug at the straps of our own inner straightjackets. Why do you smile at people who you'd much rather kick in the eye?

Alas, Morrissey's aristocratic aversion to work is now finding him unhappily without it. It is with great sadness and little surprise to learn that no imperious record label has yet to blow the dust off his unreleased tenth studio album, which has long been ready to flutter wildly against the bars. And of course, no man of wit preserves his integrity by living in retirement. It is his duty to go purposefully among the bores of this world to remind them of his superiority. He must be given a stage to impart his epigrammatic gift; to miraculously invert the most conventional and apparently reasonable values so as to reveal to us the perfect sense of their antitheses. Morrissey, by his very nature, is terrible at being dull and criminally wasted when unseen. For the time being, we may only attempt to endure without him…