Inadequacy of Aestheticism to Comprehend Art Works after a ‘Certain Moment’ of the Human Civilization: From the Eyes of the Movie ‘Amadeus’

Abstract

Art is all about human experience whether simple or complex. The content of an art work, especially its surface spectrum, is generally understood by everyone but to dig out what is beyond the surface has been considered as the duty of the art criticism until the end of bourgeois literature in the second-modernity1 . Therefore, from the Aristotelian or Barathamuni to Barthes, the art criticism had a great role to play as the mediatory. In the art criticism, the aestheticism was what has been the most over-determined principle due to its long existence as the sole tool to understand the human experience in art. The basic preconditions that determined the modern society underwent significant structural changes and, accordingly, the contours of the new era revolutionized the thinking of the ‘new world’ which ideologically depends on either postmodern nihilism or historical mutation. If the paradigm shift in the mode of production and the tools of the production changed the modern humanity, according to Marx, to an extent that not only aestheticism but any other conventional literary principles could never accurately be able to grasp, ‘the new world order’ that resulted from the failures of the modern projects and from the higher stage of capitalism completely denied to accept the fact that art can exist, in its earlier form and outlook, in the new pluralistic and less serious world. It was a new world and heaps of new experiences that the new civilizational rules created. Given the present dissidents and negation of the modernity overwhelmingly dominate the future and continue to erode the standards of the classical literature, a new form of literature and criticism would be required by us. It is assumed that the structural psychoanalysts and structural Marxists historically produced theories that could understand the new consciousness, identities and pluralistic values of the new post-industrial world order. The present form of art in this new world stands far away from the orthodox art criticism i.e. aestheticism as new tools were required by this new phenomenon. Those new tools were fairly able to understand what has not been understood previously. This thesis will elaborate how those new principles would be used in literary criticism through the eyes of the movie ‘Amadeus’ (Shaffer, 1984)) by Milos Forman, which re-narrates the historical antagonism between the two most renown Classical musicians Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756- 1791) and Antonio Salieri (1750- 1825).