Episode 171: The Beauty and the Horror

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2024

⏱️ 69 minutes

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Summary

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course of lectures and discussions starting June 20th on Weirdosphere, JF and Phil’s new online learning platform. For more information and to enroll in The Beauty and the Horror, visit www.weirdosphere.org. REFERENCES JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the audiobook, with a new introduction written and read by Donna Tartt. Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two William Blake, “The Tyger” Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark Walter Pater, The Renaissance David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return Anna Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror Donna Tartt, The Secret History Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage” Franz Schubert, “Death and the Maiden” Quartet Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840 J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes, or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdstudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. This is Phil. Right from the jump, I should tell you that J.F.'s
0:56.2	book, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, has just been released as an audiobook, read by
1:02.4	J.F. himself and with a new introduction by Donna Tart. That's right, assholes. Anyway,
1:10.1	in reclaiming art, J.F. wrote that there is a radical beauty that attains the most
1:15.2	intense expression precisely when it mixes in a bit of death and impermanence.
1:20.9	Quote, if the music of Bach is more moving than elevator musac, even though both
1:26.4	follow the same basic principles, it is because
1:29.5	Bach gave harmony a dizzyingly precarious existence. He made it teeter, perpetually, on the brink
1:37.2	of dissolution. Bach knew that pleasant melodies weren't enough to make art. For real beauty to emerge, the unthinkable had to be given its due.
1:48.0	When I first read this book, back before I had ever met J.F.,
1:52.0	I wrote bullshit on the margin next to this passage,
1:56.0	but I came to realize the profound truth of what he had written.
2:00.0	This idea of radical beauty has run like a lutecant thread through all our aesthetic
2:06.6	speculations on weird studies, and in this episode we reframe this notion with a line from
2:13.6	Dune 2, where Lady Jessica tells her son Paul that an ordeal he faces may show him
2:20.3	the beauty and the horror.
2:23.1	But is she saying that he will see two different things, or one thing that wears two faces?
2:30.0	In this episode we consider the latter possibility.
2:34.0	Radical beauty is a moving thing, wherein beauty reverses into horror and back again.
	...

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