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From my recent translation of Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art. This landmark book provides a rational interpretation of the new art –literature, drama, sculpture, music, and painting– and  for the enjoyment of art for art’s sake.
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CHAPTER 2 – ARTISTIC ART

If the new art is not accessible to every man, this means that its levers are not of a generically human kind. It is an art not for men in general, but for a very special class of men who may not be better than the others but who are evidently different.

Before anything else, one point must be clarified. What is it the majority of people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in their souls when they “like” a work of art; for instance, a theatrical performance? The answer is straight: people like a play when they have become interested in the human destinies presented to them. The loves, hatreds, sorrows, and joys of the personages move their hearts: they participate in them as though they were actual happenings in life. And they call a work “good” if it succeeds in creating the necessary quantity of illusion to make the imaginary personages appear like living persons. In poetry they will seek the passion and pain of the man that throbs behind the poet. In painting, the only works that will attract them are the figures of males and females with whom it would be interesting to live. A landscape is pronounced “pretty” if the real landscape it represents deserves for its loveliness or its poignancy to be visited on a trip.

Which means that for the majority of the people aesthetic pleasure isn’t in essence a diverse spiritual attitude, separate from what is habitual in their ordinary life. It differs only in accidental qualities: being perhaps less utilitarian, more intense, and of painless consequences. Definitely, though, the object in which art focuses, the goal of its attention, and with it all their other mental powers, is the same as in daily life: figures and human passions. And they will call art the set of means through which they are brought in contact with interesting human affairs. They will tolerate the artistic forms proper, the unreal, and fantasy only if they do not interfere with the perception of forms and human adventures. As soon as these purely aesthetic elements predominate, and the public cannot grasp well the story of John and Mary, the public will remain disoriented—at a loss as to what to make of the scene, the book, or the painting. And it is only natural; they don’t know any other attitude before the objects other than the practical one, what impassions us to infuse feelings in them. A work that does not invite this intervention leaves them clueless.
Now, at this point we must be perfectly clear. Rejoicing or grieving at such human destinies as a work of art presents or narrates is a very different thing from true artistic pleasure. Moreover: that preoccupation with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthetic enjoyment proper.

What we have is a very simple optical problem. To see an object we must adjust our visual apparatus in a certain way. If the adjustment is inadequate we won’t see the object or we’ll see it badly. Let the reader imagine that we are seeing a garden through a glass window. Our eyes will adjust in such a way that the ray of vision penetrates through the pane without being held up by it, going to rest on the shrubs and flowers. Since our goal is to see the garden, our ray of vision is thrust toward it, we do not see the glass but look clear through it—remaining the glass unperceived. The purer the glass, the less we see it. With some effort we can also disregard the garden and, withdrawing the ray of vision, detain it on the glass. We then lose sight of the garden; what we behold of it is a confused mass of color which appears pasted to the pane. Hence to see the garden and to see the windowpane are two incompatible operations which exclude one another because they require different ocular adjustments.

Similarly, whoever seeks in the work of art to empathize with the fate of John and Mary or Tristan and Isolde by adjusting his spiritual perception to them, will not see the work of art.

Tristan’s sorrows are sorrows and can arouse compassion only in so far as they are taken as real. But an object of art is artistic only because it is not real. In order to enjoy Titian’s portrait of Charles the Fifth on horseback we must forget that this is Charles the Fifth the authentic and living person, and see instead a portrait, an unreal image, a fiction. The portrayed subject and his portrait are two entirely different objects; we are interested in either one or the other. In the first case we “live” with Charles the Fifth, in the second we “gaze” at an object of art.

But the great majority of people are incapable of adjusting their attention to the pane and the transparency that is the work of art; instead they look right through it, wallowing passionately in the human reality alluded to in the work of art. Should they be invited to let go of this prey and to direct their attention to the work of art itself, they will say that they cannot see such a thing, which indeed they cannot, because they cannot see human objects; only artistic transparencies and virtual purities will they see.

During the XIX century artists proceeded in all too impure a fashion. They reduced the strictly aesthetic elements to a minimum and let the work consist almost entirely in a fiction of human realities. In this sense we can say that all normal art of the last century has been realistic. Realistic were Beethoven and Wagner. Realists were Chateaubriand as well as Zola. Romanticism and Naturalism, from today’s vantage point, draw closer together and reveal their common realistic root.

Works of this kind are only partially works of art, or artistic objects. Their enjoyment does not depend upon our power to adjust to the transparencies and images, which constitutes the artistic sensibility. All they require is human sensibility to let resonate within our neighbor’s joys and worries. We can see why nineteenth century art has been so popular: it is made for the masses inasmuch as it is not art but an ex¬tract from life. Let us remember that in epochs with two different types of art, one has been for minorities and one for the majority, the latter has always been realistic.
Let’s not now discuss whether pure art is possible. Perhaps it is not; but since the reasons that drive us to this negation are somewhat long and difficult—it’s better to drop the subject.

Besides, it is not of major importance to our current theme. Even though pure art may be impossible there is doubtless a tendency toward a purification of art. Such a tendency will arrive at a progressive elimination of the human, all too human, elements predominant in romantic and naturalistic production. And in this process a point can be reached in which the human content has grown so thin that we can barely see it. We’ll then have an object that can be perceived only by those endowed with the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility. It will be an art for artists and not for the masses; it will be an art the high born, and not for the populace.

That is why modern the artist divides the public into two classes, those who understand it and those who do not understand it; that is to say, those who are artists and those who are not. The new art is an artistic art.
I do not propose to extol the new way in art or to condemn the old one used in the past century. I restrict myself to characterize them as the zoologist characterizes two contrasting species. The new art is a world-wide fact. For about twenty years now the most alert young people of two successive generations —in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Rome, and Madrid— have found themselves faced with the undeniable fact that traditional art bored them; moreover, that they detest it. With these young people one can do one of two things: either shoot them, or try to understand them. I have opted in favor of the latter.

Promptly have I noticed in them the blossoming of a new sense of art, perfectly clear, coherent, and rational. Far from being a whim, their way of feeling is the inevitable and fruitful result of the previous entire artistic evolution.
Whimsical, arbitrary, and consequently useless it would be to set oneself against the new style and obstinately remain shut up within forms already archaic, exhausted, and obsolete. In art, as in morals, duty does not depend on our personal judgment; we have to accept the working imperative imposed by the time. Submission to the order of the day, to be certain, is the only probability open to the individual. Even so he may achieve nothing; but his failure is much more likely if he insists on composing another Wagnerian opera, or another naturalistic novel.
In art all repetition is null. Each style that manifests itself in history can engender a certain number of different forms within a generic type. But there always comes a day when the magnificent quarry is depleted. This, for instance, has happened with romantic-naturalistic novel and theater.

It is a naive error to believe that the present infecundity of both genres is due to lack of personal talent. What happens is that the possible combinations within them are exhausted. Thus, it must be deemed fortunate that this exhaustion coincides with the emergence of a new artistic sensibility capable of detecting new and untouched quarries.

When we analyze the new style we find certain closely connected tendencies. It tends (1) to dehumanize art, (2) to avoid living forms, (3) to insure that the work of art is nothing but a work of art, (4) to consider art as play and nothing else, (5) to be essentially ironical, (6) to elude all falsehood and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization. And finally, (7) art, according to the young artists, is a thing of no transcending consequence.
Let’s sketch briefly each of these features of the new art.

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