In Art as in Life

Ilario Colli's bold first work, In Art As in Life, ventures into territory few modern culture theorists dare to cover. Setting forth a brash new conception of aesthetics, the author argues that the prevailing artistic trends of any given epoch are a direct by–product of the metaphysical undercurrents that gave rise to them. In the god–fearing Middle Ages, man created an equally god–glorifying music and literature. In the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as the focus began slowly to move from god to man, the arts followed suit, slowly gaining a self–confident humanism it had lacked.

This "anchoring" of the arts in metaphysics has been the case throughout history and our era is no exception. We live in the wake of Nietzsche's famous nihilistic proclamation, "God is Dead," in a paradigm in which there is no one "truth," no all–encompassing "‘Meaning." All philosophical propositions are equally valid to us and therefore, equally void of universality and usefulness. The artist is left in the dark, bereft of an aesthetic compass that serves as her aesthetic guide. Ostensibly, she is free to create as she pleases, but there is a dark side to her liberty.

Learned yet imminently accessible, In Art As in Life delights with its sumptuous language and its profound ideas. Its effortless navigation through 1,700 years of literature, music, and the visual arts leads the reader to a startling conclusion: the contemporary Postmodern aesthetic, like the moral relativism that spawned it, is not–as it's often claimed to be–a sign of a robust, self–confident, creative culture, but rather the primary artistic symptom of a metaphysically ailing civilisation, one still recovering from the demise of moral absolutism and still struggling to find meaning in its wake.

If we are to rebuild our literature, music, and art, we must first rebuild the metaphysical structure it is meant to rest safely on.

-- Ilario Colli