Nietzsche's positive evaluation of illusion

Hello! I want to write my bachelor thesis about Nietsche’s positive evaluation of illusion from an aesthetic point of view and have to present it in July 2018. I don’t have a general plan for my thesis and the first step is to reread the works of Nietzsche and to take notes on the matter. In the meantime, I would like us to discuss Nietzsche’s aesthetics, the prevalence of art over science, his refutation of the slogan “l’art pour l’art” and his emphasis on the discriminatory character of the artist et cetera.

I don’t read Nietzsche but I like your topic of choice. I could equate aesthetic appreciation as an illusion myself, or worship of isolated form. (Once the form is isolated, you can add things to it, based on the quality of your imagination; that is, it can become bigger than life). People readily admire a beautiful building, for example, but you rarely see them admiring the building process itself, or the painting process of a painting. What purpose does aesthetic appreciation have, especially these days? It’s mostly form without content. Today, most of things that are beautiful are also fake, because beauty has become an industry (and probably has been for a long time).
There could, of course, be an argument made in favor of seductive power of an illusion. How much has been actually done throughout history solely on the account of beautiful (or ugly) lies? A lot. Perhaps the truth does not move most of people as much as lie does.

youtube.com/watch?v=rcjpags7JT8

I agree with you, but let me tell you a point of view which has struck me a few days ago while I was brushing my teeth. I was looking inside the shower and there was a brown wet leaf on the floor near a green shower mat, and I don’t know why but from that image I was thinking at contemporary ready made and at all those kinds of works which are exposed in the great majority of museums and galleries, and in me an idea sparked. I was thinking that the role of those kinds of artworks is to enlarge our aesthetic awareness in our daily life. I’m convinced that they will not stand the test of time, but they will in a way, through the enlargement of our aesthetic sensibility. For example, I have a friend, who is fascinated with the “unconscious art that some workers and people produce on the streets” and here are some photos to see what he means:

I think that art, beginning with the XXth century has entered into a new major phase, and to use a word from Nietzsche, in a Dyonisian age. For the first time in the history of art, everything is seriously losing its Apollonian grounds (Schoenberg with atonality, Duchamp with the ready-made, Picasso, Brâncuși et cetera). I think that this change of paradigm is the reason why we have started to appreciate much more the form, the impression, the surface of things so to speak. I think that the Dyonisian spirit which prevails in art today regarding the form is just this phenomenon of embracing randomness and to “worship” it. Artists emancipated themselves from the traditional forms and they have understood that there is something else beyond this limits. As an artist myself, I have to tell you that I’m very attracted to textures in painting, domain which has never found its “farmers” until the last century, but in my case the texture is not a goal in itself, because my ideal is to be able to create a synthesis between form and content. So I think that to appreciate this kind of art which is concentrating mostly on the form you have to make abstraction of the concept of that object and travel as far as he is able to carry you, for when you return to be struck by his aesthetic potential even if it’s a simple object.

Anyway, all I want to say is that this kind of works are playing their role which I think is a positive one, but I can’t say I appreciate them in the same way I appreciate a painting by Bosch, Gauguin or Max Beckmann. I think the artists should be appreciated in themselves and not by comparation.

I agree. The masses have always been moved by great beautiful or ugly lies, but this seductiveness is rather ideological than aesthetical.

Dyonesian is not ‘random’, rather chaotic and instinctive.

Nietzsche opposed l’art pour l’art, or rather thought it was an absurd notion, because of the implication that art doesn’t have motive or valuation. Everything has motive, and is personal, especially art. I think he would dismiss modern art, precisely because it is random, abstract and as has been said, all form and no content (e.g. apollo incarnate).

The reason he valued art over science, is essentially the same, because he valued the personal above the abstract. And science and philosophy (hitherto) has been the quest of trying to extract universal essences out of the particular by abstracting away the context, the history etc… the personal.

Ultimately i suppose he favored the one over the other because it was more life-affirming. In so far as illusions are necessary for life, he favoured them, but not necessarily all of them regardless, i don’t think.