Michelangelo, ‘The Awakening Slave’, marble, c. 1520-23, Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze, Florence
‘…art has the vocation of revealing the truth in the form of sensuous artistic shape, of representing the reconciled antithesis…’
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Trans., Bernard Bosanquet, Ed., Introduction and Commentary, Michael Inwood, Penguin, England, 2004, 61
The representation of reconciled antitheses is used to maintain dominant ideologies. It comforts and reassures.
The greatest art is that which represents antitheses unreconciled. The subject is left unresolved, uncertain, open – it entices with pathways in. The audience are either frustrated or forced to think.
materialism, mysticism and art 