Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 13 Fall 1995

              Concept and Aesthetics in George Santayana
Angel or demon, what unearthly spell
Returns, divinely false like all things fair,
To mock this desolation?
(G. Santayana, Odi et Amo)
In our time — and for our purposes I am referring to the last quarter of a century
— art, settled, like every other aspect of our society into its corresponding crisis,
has attained a status of compulsive complacency.1 Bereft of all possibilities, it has
relinquished its worries as well. Art cannot advance, for progress has been shown to
be an Illusion; It is unable to regress, for every stone age painting or African mask has
long been not only modem, but an inspiration for modernity; to establish itself in a
market In which nothing arouses attention or acquires a high price except as novelty
is Impossible, while to die out would not prove easy for it either, inasmuch as its
agony, death, burial and sumptuous or ironic funeral have been something relatively
frequent ever since Hegel decreed that all its reality belongs to the past. Those who
said that everything is art, pointing to a portrait in the exhibition hall, a tack in the cork
of a bulletin board, a couple of stones piled up with careful neglect or the graffiti in
the subway, have grown hoarse or become mute from boredom: indeed, even children
know that all this and every other thing is art, so it makes little sense to continue
proclaiming what no one contests.
Whether on account of their own weariness (fastidio) or that of their audience,
another group is falling silent as well, namely those who said that nothing was art, but
rather business, or class struggle* or sublimation of repressed sexuality, or manoeuvre
of the will to power, or a hypostasis of the ludic instinct: would someone perchance
dare to claim that that which we designate with the prestigious and silly tide "art" is
something more than a necessary product of one, several, or even all of these decisive
moments (instancias)! Since everything is art, since nothing is art, the rest is silence.
It is no longer that art Is in crisis, an apocalyptic triviality which would merely relate
it to the world economy, political parties, philosophy and the mail, but that the crisis
itself has become art, and as such partakes of its overwhelming beatitude. The fact is
that the universal deterioration has ceased to impress us. Some years ago we were
saying, with satisfaction or dismay, "This can't last much longer!," but with time we
have become convinced that it is we ourselves who are not going to last too long, while
everything else will go on as always, scraping along be tihe skin of its teeth, that Is to
say, perfectly. Tills holds true for art, as for everything else. Each has concentrated
on attending narclssistically to the process of its own decadence, bored of
contemplating the general decadence: the spectacle thus gains in velocity what it loses
in amplitude.
On the theoretical plane it is also inaccurate to say — as do the usual optimists —
that we are living in an age of confusion.   In order to suffer from confusion it is
1 This paper is a translation, by Mr. Renzo Llorente of SUNY at Stony Brook, of the
essay "Concepto y Est&iea en George Santayana" of Fernando Savater. The original is published
in Instrucciones Para Olvidar El Quijote y Otros ensayos generates by Taurus Ediciones, S. A.,
Madrid, 1985