Archive for: Текстови објављени у часопису Култура на српском накнадно преведени на стране језике

This paper examines Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on the role of music in moral education, with special emphasis on the chapters of Republic and Politics dealing with musical harmony and musical scales, regarded as formal aspects of music as an art form. Comparing these two philosophers’ positions their approach to the art of music appears to be different, which seems to have consequences in terms of both their conceptions of education and their aesthetics. Pointing out the differences in their choice of musical scales and instruments suitable for education, the paper discusses whether the reasons why these differences exist are to be found in their own philosophical doctrines or in the conventionally established musicianship of their epoch to which both these authors refer but reach different conclusions.

Analyzing various interviews given by the architect Bogdan Bogdanović, which were compiled in a book Glib i krv (Mud and Blood), we could discern two different images of Belgrade that he cherished in his mind. One was an image of a mythical city of old Celtic civilization, raised between the two rivers – the Danube and the Sava as male and the female symbols – which was a mixture of a futuristic modernism and prehistoric necropolis and settlements. The other image was imprinted with rough changes that the Yugoslav society underwent after 1983, which he had anticipated saying that almost all Balkan cities would end up like archeological sites, buried under ruins of a culture and history of many nations. This paper will also analyze the first monument raised in Belgrade in honour of the Jewish victims to fascism, and will try to discover a universal symbolic of the memorial monument this eminent architect built from 1960-1980. The intent is to offer an ethical reading of the almost forgotten language of symbols, visual signs and arts which partially justifies the nature of Man/Builder and Man/Destroyer found in all of us.

The author examines the intertwining notions of “beautiful” and “good” by analyzing the aesthetic and moral standards of contemporary popular culture, represented by the general cultural paradigm of “Hollywood”, understood not only as a filmmaking school, but also as a symbol of global commercial values and aesthetics in general. Hollywood is perceived as conservative regarding the modernist (and contemporary) trend of “separating aesthetics from morals”, insisting on a strong parallelism and correlation between the physical beauty of the protagonist and the morality of his/her actions. This correlation and its applications are actively used in political and ideological propaganda, usually serving the imperialist interests of the American economic and political oligarchy, but is also – especially in the case of artistically best and critically most acclaimed films – often openly subversive toward the values and the political ideology of the USA and Western society in general. The author examines a few examples of moral controversies stemming from the Hollywood paradigms of beauty, as seen in the Game of Thrones TV series, while maintaining that Hollywood aesthetics seems to be more permanent and immutable than the Hollywood ethics, confirming the ancient philosophical paradigm of καλοκαγαθία.