Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

Is aesthetics only about art that is beautiful as conventionally understood? If not, what purpose does art that may not be so serve? My new essay published in May 2022 in Blue Labyrinths        Image: John Constable, Hadleigh Castle (1837) (Public Domain)

 It is a commonplace to claim that art imitates life. If so, art, in performing this mimesis, should respond also to our obsession and concern with temporality (time as experienced, not as measured, or human time as opposed to what the metaphysicians claim). How does art participate in this alchemy of smelting clock time into felt time? Read essay at Blue Labyrinths .

My essay Aesthetic ineffability and the rebirth of the reader  was published in May 2020 on  Aesthetics Research Lab ,  a "digital think tank and resource, revolving around theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" conceived by Michael Spicher, PhD.  Here is the  link . This essay examine the idea that literature is as capable of giving rise to an experience of aesthetic ineffability as the other arts. Furthermore, the ineffable experience in literature may be a product of both the author and the reader, and that there is similarly a need for a confluence between the artist and viewer in other art forms too for ineffability to arise.

My essay titled A disdain for the discrete: How art transcends logic and language published in the March 2018 issue of  Epoché Magazine - and here is the link . Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Ruins, 1650 (NGA, Washington DC) In this essay I argue that art is able to open a new window on to reality only when art can transcend reason and the confines of language. I contend further that both logic and language have their limitations when used as tools for the creation of meaning and that art helps us overcome these inadequacies in the way it transcends — or even transgresses — the absolutes that underpin our “rational” view of the world. I believe too that the violation of the strictures of logic by art is also emblematic of art’s heightened awareness of certain unique features of reality — in particular, its dynamic and fluid nature — which are not normally readily visible to a mind tied to thinking in terms only of binary truth values.