The Aesthetic of Art: a Mediation of the Sublime

Abstract

The process of art that I have advanced in defining CTA is simply one method by which we might begin make sense of the work of a certain type of individual, the artist, in reaching a plausible knowledge of their view of our social world. In a general sense, the social world becomes the object of the Artist’s art.⁶⁸ Here I make the broad assumption that the social world exists as a complex set of phenomena (for example real and imaginary things, concepts and ideas and their inter-relationships) and that CTA allows for the portraying of a plausible knowledge of it through an aesthetic realization of social facts concerning these phenomena. However, in a particular sense, I am also concerned with gaining an Art-aesthetic understanding of specific phenomena that represent the subset of the social world delineated as the sub-universe of management and organization. Within this subset, I have posited a key premiss that the totality of the phenomena and their relationships constitutes a managerial burden of complexity and ambiguity. Intuitively, the totality of this burden is great enough so that it tends to the axiomatic that — to an individual’s contemplation — many phenomena and relationships remain unknown or even unknowable. I therefore argue that many social facts lie outside an individual’s primary modes of perception. Here, in its totality, I label the sub-universe of management and organization as a sublime environment.

He who has not felt that there may be beauty without littleness, and that such beauty is a source of the sublime, is yet ignorant of the meaning of the ideal in art.

John Ruskin, 1873