Art - desire and pornography

I’m interested in Art today because when we conceive of Art it might be easier to get a glimpse into the notion that whatever we do has an effect on our self. That there is an objective quality to everything we do that could be measured and that in the different spheres of life (I wonder if this is what Butler would call performativity of which I understood nothing), whether the “participation” is conscious or not, the quality of what is experienced is the same.

If we look at the next part of this article, I might be able to explain this better.

Factors involved in aesthetic judgment

Judgments of aesthetic value seem often to involve many other kinds of issues as well. Responses such as disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting.

Elena: Could we assume that there is an objective beauty in cleanliness? That the mixture of soup and hair gives the impression of boundaries that have jumped over themselves? Is it not similar to throwing up? What belongs to the stomach, should not rest in the hair? Is hair an attribute of beauty in the human body?

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Wikipedia: “Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may give us a reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as an increased heart rate or widened eyes. These unconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.

Elena: This sublimity that most people tend to recognize in a beautiful landscape. What can we abscribe it to? Is it not interesting that children take all these things for granted? At what time in our lives does the experience of a sublime landscape enter into our consciousness? What I’m pointing to here is the idea that in childhood we are ourselves sublime and the sublimity of life outside ourselves is actually experienced in the joy of discovering everything. A child, before his surrounding has marked his perceptions,  doesn’t stand before a landscape, another person or a plate of food and looks at them in awe, he simply sees without separating from or judging them. He registers it. In time he might well judge that those experiences were positive or negative in his development but while they are happening through childhood, s/he simply experiences them.

Wikipedia: Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful. The Abuse of Beauty, Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value.[8] We might judge a Lamborghini to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or we might judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political or moral values.

Elena: Or we can see it’s beautiful beyond the fact that what it cost to produce it could have fed a thousand children who starved. We can take both realities and not avoid the consequences of either one of them. We don’t have to stop exploring great cars to feed a thousand more children. It is more a question of more rational distribution.

Wikipedia: "Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies". in Studies in animal and human behavior, vol. 2. pp. 115–195. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971 (originally pub. 1950.) Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that is often what we are judging. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.

Elena: Of course, you can well judge me for taking wikipedia as a reference for my discourse but this is only a beginning. In this paragraph it is clear how limited a source this one can be. It implies the connection between aesthetics and all the other realms but one crucial one that it avoids to look at is the connection between beauty and desire for example as experienced in pornography.

Pornography is another of those extremes, like cults, that needs to be taken great advantage of to study the mechanisms of our perceptions and the power of desire in determining our lives. How the absence of love in childhood turns into the presence of desire in teenagers is a whole world of exploration. How we try to compensate what we so desperately needed in a period of our lives and how the inability to compensate worsens and amplifies the initial loss.

Yes, this is an area of understanding that I am not seeing in a lot of what I research but probably I just haven’t researched enough. It is an area that will be of importance in my own presentation and delineation of how the four spheres presented in Cults, the Cancer, act and interact on each other.

There is an aspect of memory that must be tapped on here. As if what becomes desire in teenage years is the unconscious memory of what one was deprived of as a child. Are experiences of awe before a sublime sunset a memory of our own inner world? What is really the connection between our experience of nature and our selves? Our experience of other people, family, society and our selves?

Wikipedia: Anthropology, especially the savanna hypothesis proposed by Gordon Orians and others, predicts that some of the positive aesthetics that people have are based on innate knowledge of productive human habitats. It had been shown that people prefer and feel happier looking at trees with spreading forms much more than looking at trees with other forms, or non-tree objects;[citation needed] also Bright green colors, linked with healthy plants with good nutrient qualities, were more calming than other tree colors, including less bright greens and oranges.