Естетиката

To get some idea of ​​the "murky whirlpool of problems" in which the aesthetes of the United States and Canada have found themselves today, it would be enough to leaf through the latest issues of the representative American quarterly "The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism." It is the organ of the American Society of Aesthetics. Its editor is the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Professor Thomas Munro, the universally recognized leader of contemporary American aesthetes. In the March issue, in an article entitled "A Criterion for Art Criticism in Contemporary Art," Lester D. Longman says: "It is not clear what we value most in art today. . . Since we fear that any clearly defined Criterion in art would seem dogmatic, we prefer anarchy in critical thinking."

There is too much work and talk about the exact methods of describing artistic phenomena in our time. It is quite natural that people talk mainly about their present and even more about their future, while groundlessly self-confident statements about their efficiency are often met with extreme skepticism, with positions that are essentially nihilistic: exact methods will never be able to cope with this or that problem... However, in conversations and polemics, the fact is constantly ignored that the vigorous modern development of exact methods is not a unique phenomenon in the history of aesthetics, as some of its advocates try to suggest. Aesthetics experienced, and not so long ago, a hardly less vigorous fascination with the search for exact methods for describing the work of art, the creative and perceptual process, and the development of art. And although the two periods differ from each other in a number of essential features, interesting analogies with useful, orienting conclusions can be drawn between them.

Every time we come into contact with the poetry of Hristo Smirnenski, we are struck by the flames and lights of our socialist revolution. We remain with particles of his ardor, of his heart, of his boundless love for the "hard-working brothers", for the people's forces unleashed by the revolution, for Moscow blazing with its purple rubies. In these communications with the poet, impulses for struggle, firmness in upholding the communist ideal, confidence in its triumph were born and are born. And it is especially important that these feelings and thoughts arise not only in the conscious fighter, but above all in the worker, among the broadest layers of the people, among those who themselves are the engines of history.