Empathy

What is the beauty of art? It seems that I found some explanations in Mundt’s article. And I like Vischer’s words a lot.

Idealist thinks that the beautiful is the revelation of liberty in Nature. Formalist thinks that the beautiful is not in the representation of an idea but solely in mathematical, formal relations. (P8) Vischer stands the monumental sentence: “The artist is the content of the work of art”. (P6) Zimmermann stated “the aesthetic spirit differs from the unaesthetic one by the how, not by what, of his imagination, his summarizing, feeling, thinking.”

So I think the form and the content of a work should accord with the feeling that can be brought to the viewers also.

(P7) Vischer says “pure forms...they please me because they favor the approaches, circumnavigations and transpositions of the imagination, because they generates in me a harmonious process of feeling.”

In Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the geometric form extending to the ground and the reflecting black marble are all representing the mourning feeling of the Vietnam War. So it’s also the expression of empathy.

(P8) Robert Vischer produced the idea of empathy. “The reason for this remarkable union of subject and object is an emotionally conception… weighted conception…The pantheist desire toward a union with the world is the basis of this symbolizing activity”