Marta Moldovan-Cywińska: Aesthete and Artist

It was supposed to be about male friendship. Reality led my pen in a different direction. Disappointment in the Artist is one of the most traumatic disappointments for the Aesthete. It appears suddenly, creeping up when he is living on the remnants of his enthusiasm, striking predatory like a relapse of depression. If it concerns a work that does not live up to expectations, it does not cause pain, only a murmur in the mind and anxiety. If, however, it concerns the behavior of the Artist - especially one whom he has known for years - the disappointment is exceptionally cruel. The gap between imagination and reality tears the Aesthete in two, but he will not show how much he suffers because of it. After all, he idealizes not only the Artist, and reality turns out to be different. Ironically, the cult of the (artistic) individual and the expectations placed on them are always limited. I will shout this out in my next book.

In such a tandem of sensitivity, unfortunately, it is the Artist who does not keep their promises or, after a short time, shows the Aesthete support when they do not provide them with a systematic dose of adoration. The Aesthete distances himself from the Artist, who does not reply to text messages or emails, and responds curtly to questions when they meet symbolically at a red light at a crosswalk. For psychologists, these were merely a dissonance between anticipated and actual experience worthy of analysis, although the disappointed ones can call crying in the middle of the night. On this occasion, I also remember the exceptional Daniel Z., who was both an Artist and an Aesthete, and who, being friends with artists, never really who was both an Artist and an Aesthete, and while befriending artists, he never expected gratitude from them.

In German philosophy, disappointment reveals the limitations of human will and reason. Schopenhauer saw life as a constant struggle with suffering and unfulfilled desires; the latter can never be fully satisfied, and the world does not live up to our expectations. Hegel saw disappointment in the dialectical process—the confrontation between what we think is possible and the real world leads to the development of consciousness and self-knowledge (although we pay a cruel price for it). Nietzsche treated disappointment as a stimulus to overcome one's own limitations and experience “dissonance with reality.” Disappointment as tension reveals the limits of human control over the world and leads to reflection on the fragility of expectations. An emotionally cold person - and I don't mean German philosophers here! - is characterized by low emotional reactivity. For the Stoics, disappointment is treated as a stimulus to exercise virtue and distance from emotions, rather than as a source of suffering, which I consider comparable to eating a kilogram of mandarins and drinking 1.5 liters of Coke at once. It acidifies thinking!

From a philosophical point of view, the lack of response to wishes can be seen as a confrontation between expectations and reality. The Aesthete ponders the impermanence of relationships day after day, while the Artist would prefer to control reality, because he is unable to master art; increasingly, especially in times of new technological developments, he is a performer, a subcontractor, and he cares less and less. Modigliani - if he were alive - would revoke all postulates prohibiting the existence of landscape and still life in art. The Artist would not befriend the Aesthete, but the Art Dealer. A friendship-arrangement would not result in any disappointment.

Marta Moldovan-Cywińska

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