Pragmatic Aesthetic
While Carney decries surface style and finds using symbols to gain meaning from a work promotes a shallow understanding of art, he believes that the meaning of the work lies at its surface. He posits a world where art is appreciated for what the work actually contains rather than what is read into it, an aesthetic he refers to as pragmatic. Living moment to moment, he argues, one can, for example, just appreciate the acting in a film and gain meaning from that, from what the characters actually say and do, and the tonal shifts that accompany these actions.
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Famous quotes containing the words pragmatic and/or aesthetic:
“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1934)
“An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)