Hutter, Michael, and David Throsby. Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Page 50, essay by Richard Shusterman
“This balanced view of entertainment is decisively disturbed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s influential aesthetics, with its fateful spiritualizing turn toward the ideal. With Hegel, entertainment seems unequivocally identified with what is unworthy of the name of art. In his initial remarks to affirm the worthiness of art in his Vorlesungen uber die Asthetik, Hegel feels he must sharply distinguished between “true art” and the “servile” artistic distractions that are merely “a fleeting game in the service of pleasure and entertainment”…and of other “external” ends of “life-related pleasantness.” Entertainment thus marks the inferior realm of servitude to pleasure and it external ends. In contrast, the fine arts (die schonen Kunste) only become true art (wahrhafte Kunst) when the are free of this subservience. This Hegelian attitude still, sadly, dominates contemporary aesthetics, whose idealist turn has privileged, in the realm of art, truth over beauty and pleasure, while also aesthetically privileging the realm of art high above natural splendors.
Friedrich Nietzsche presents a more complex and salutary view of entertainment and its relationship to art and though. He can deploy the term very pejoratively to denote a trivial concern with shall pleasure and the passing of time to alleviate boredom. On the other hand, in Ecce Homo (“Why I Am So Clever”, Section 3), Nietzsche expresses the positive power of entertainment through the notion of “recreation” (Erholung), which he regards, along with choice of climate and nourishment, as essential to self-care, as what allows him to escape himself and his own self-demanding “seriousness” (Ernst). Nietzsche in fact claims, “Every kind of reading belongs among my recreations.” An intense practitioner of self-meditation like Montaigne, Nietzsche seems to affirm the productive paradox of entertainment’s distraction that we earlier gleaned from etymology and from Montaigne – that the self is sustained and strengthened by being freed from attention to itself, that serious self-care also entails amusing distraction from oneself. And this paradox, I think, implies a further dialectical lesson: that the self is enlarged and improved by forgetting itself and plunging its interest in the wider world.”
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