Q.

Discuss Sartre’s view of art and its relationship with the world through your own examples of
any two of the following (a) music (b) cinema (c) fine arts (d) theatre.

Sartre discusses in his ‘The Work of Art’ an important principle is stated as ‘the work of art is an
irreality’. This principle is elaborated with the help of an example of a painting, that of Charles
VIII. The irreal content of the work of art is formed by an imaginative consciousness and is
therefore imaginative and not perceptual. What is perceptual is the real world and what is
imaginative lies in the consciousness and the work of art, as a matter of being attributed to irreality
is something which does not really belong to the real world. For Sartre, the painting is not an object
of aesthetics. In ‘The Work of Art’, he further considers the examples of drama and music claiming
that what could be said of a painting, could also be said of other works of art.
(a) Music
A piece of music is one of the objects that Sartre thinks is able to escape the irreality by the virtue
of itself. According to Sartre, the ensemble of notes as a whole is just itself and is an entity. Sartre
points out a few differences by comparing between the piece of music and a daily experience. The
first one is about the succession of events, where one hand we listen to the musical notes
succeeding and we experience some event which are a construction of the actions by persons. The
former is a case of an absolute succession while the latter is a real succession. The second
difference he talks about is a temporal one. The piece of music is free from time, and in fact, it has
its own time which he calls the inner time. He further concludes that it does not exist in reality but
instead, is beyond space and time, and out of existence.
(b) Cinema
Applying a similar evaluation done upon the painting of Charles VIII and the recent example of
the piece of music, we can see what is produced from it when we take cinema as a work of art.
Just as when we observe any work of art and confuse it for real, Sartre argues that watching a film
is no different and we in this case too, we erroneously believe the imaginative for real. In a film,
we experience the pictorial and verbal analogue of what the screen and speakers present to our
eyes, which in turn is representational form of what the camera is recording during the shoot and
what the actors are speaking during a dialogue. All the elements of a film, that includes, the
characters, their emotions, the dialogues spoken by them, and so on, that we witness and enjoy as
forms of aesthetic pleasure are in fact, analogues of the unreal. All these exist in our imaginative
consciousness.
Imagination plays an important role in the work of art and he attributes the problem of work of art
to the question of imagination itself. Locating the ‘objects of aesthetics’ in irreality, Sartre sems
to be positing the existence of a different world altogether. This could be understood post looking
at his description about the objects of aesthetics being a part of our imagination and not something
which can be apprehended by our perception. By doing this, he is necessarily creating a distinction
between the imagination and perception, apprising that both are mutually exclusive.