From the Journal of John Doe

January 22, 2014

When it comes to art, nature, and beauty in the 21st century, it is hard to have a conversation without encountering the concept of the "sublime" - an overwhelming sense of emotion that can be instilled upon the observation of nature in its most primal form. Artists have been trying to capture this sentiment for centuries, and curators have been attempting to sell the idea of this form of emotional greatness to museum patrons for just as long. But what can be said for today's art viewer? To investigate whether the sublime is truly present in the state of art, I recently visited a few museums in central London, notably the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, to attempt to glean some sort of answer to this question.

Luckily for me, one of the first collections I happened across at the Tate Modern was dedicated to Abstraction and the Sublime. The information board for this collection made note that many artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement developed in the 1940's, and managed to merge an 18th century concept into very modern formats of art. "Intense experience emerged in enriched colour." Needless to say, I was fascinated, and forged onwards.

Many of the artworks before me were formless in shape, such that if one were to ask me what I was looking at, one would receive a different answer each time. This is the peculiar thing about art - it is entirely individual in gains. You get from art what you put into it. Emotion is the same way - formless, unbodied, emotion is an entirely innate experience, something which nobody else is as expertly informed as yourself. Nobody can tell you how you feel about any particular piece of art - one person can definitively say they have no interest in the artwork of Monet, and another can be a huge fan and collector. Herein lies the crux of the sublime as an abstraction - we can't definitively say whether the "sublime" exists or not because it is an innate feeling. Unless we are willing to prescribe an overarching generalization to the entire human population, (I, for one, am not comfortable with such an idea) a discussion of whether or not the sublime exists in modern or past contexts is inherently fruitless.

So where does that leave us? If we can't discuss it, what can we do with "the sublime"? I think for one, we can appreciate its historical complexities and allow it to influence how art affects us in the modern age. Art can be all-consuming if we allow it, but it can also be destructive or simply nothing at all.

Just like the art I viewed, this conversation is getting very abstract, so I'll bring it back down to Earth. "The Sublime" as a concept represents 18th-century values in a modern light. When we view art nowadays, our views are affected by media (both social and informative), violence, technology, and quick and easy access to looking at any landscape we want. Inventions such as Google Earth and the like have made it possible to be transported to the Great Wall of China or the Pacific Ocean with the click of a button, and easily accessible modes of transportation have made it much easier to travel the world and see such places. What predominantly affected the viewpoints of those who popularized "the sublime" in the 17-1800's was a lack of such accessories. Paintings such as those created by J.M.W. Turner and poems and writings such as that of William Wordsworth or William Cowper were transporting - they took the consumer to a place they could never imagine to go. Comparing "the sublime" of the 18th century to "the sublime" of today would be to no avail.

Times have changed, and as such, our interpretations of emotion and feeling have as well.