and the duality of the aesthetic to provide a picture of human existence
that would not be accessible to most people.
Adorno and other German philosophers alive in the early 20th century
were also questioning the nature of art, but did this on a broader scale.
With a rise in technological advancement and scientific inquiry in the
modern age, the world seemed less mysterious than it had in the past.
With the disillusionment of the world, nature became far less interesting
for artists to depict and the artworld changed to reflect the shifting
time. This “disenchantment, the indefinite recruitment of ever more
domains into the grasp of an indifferent system of commensuration,
reaches down into everyday life and tendentially robs it of subjective
qualification” (Bernstein 1991: 9). Things once regarded as beautiful and
worth recreating artistically lost their power as they became reduced to
their commensurate value; with the commodification of the world came
a feeling of objectivity which permeated the artworld and removed value
from what had previously held mystique. In the disenchanted world art
could not just recreate, it had to reveal more than science could.
Because of my experiences with Benn and other Modern German writers,
I was very intrigued during the lectures about art as self-expression and
conceptions of beauty. These became related in my mind because I
wondered why someone would want to express something despicable
in art and how this would reflect back on the artist. The chapter we
read about beauty cleared this up to an extent stating that the art’s
“unpleasantness (which derives from its gruesomeness) is outweighed
by its value (which also derives from its gruesomeness)” (Matravers
2013: 111). In this explanation, the value of art such as Benn’s comes
from the message it contains which outweighs and also originates from
its repulsiveness. Flowery poetry often bored me because it did not force
me to reflect and question my inner self, it allowed for a surface level
enjoyment. While poetry and art that engages purely physical aesthetic
delight is worthwhile in its own right, I am a person who wants to be
challenged by art.
The first work of Benn’s that I read was Little Aster, a short poem about
a mortician performing an autopsy on a cadaver with a lower between its
teeth. While this description suggests gruesome diction or a distressed
tone, Benn bypasses an emotional consideration of the body and gives
his narrator an affection for the flower. When he describes the treatment
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