Bas Jan Ader, I'm too sad to tell you, 1970
In
Either/Or, Kierkegaard offers us a
choice between the aesthetic and the ethical. Here the aesthetic is not
necessarily confined to art, being instead the locus of perception, of
experience or sensory immediacy. The aesthetic life is one of appreciation or
deliberate enrichment of experience.
By
contrast, to choose the ethical life is to go beyond self-interest and
gratification, beyond the moment and its acquisitiveness, in the direction of
the other, for the sake of the other. Freedom is the ability to break loose
from self-concern. The ethical subject is capable of commitment, of postponing
pleasure in response to a call.
While
the life-time art project is hardly a commitment to the ethical life, it does
seem to go beyond aesthetics, in Kierkegaard’s expanded sense of the term.
Unless the project is glimpsed beyond its products or moments, the latter make
little sense. The project rescues the artist from senseless immediacy.