Cultural Aesthetics and Context

The search for the understanding of aesthetics is one of the cornerstones of the artistic world, and one that I was not aware of until recently. As a someone more dedicated to drawing simply what I felt was good it never occurred to me to search more fully into the world of aesthetics, the philosophical function of beauty – in that way I was following my own branch of aesthetics, intuitionist.

The function of aesthetics between media types is one way of describing what I am aiming at researching, in that certain stories told can contain and create a feeling amongst the spectator, and that feeling is what should be preserved when the story is retold in another media type – the factual delivery of information versus the emotional delivery. Stories do not change, but our culture does – this needs to be reflected when revisiting a story, that the cultural changes may cause the emotional weight to be lost behind the factual delivery, the facts sent from the original story may change the mood of the story and destroy entirely what has been set out to create.

One aspect of this that would tie directly into my project is the protagonist's thoughts – the work reads in the first person, allowing an internal view of the character and his feelings, but also the feelings and attitudes of the author, H.P. Lovecraft.

Unfortunately, as an Englishman of 'proper' upbringing moved to a world of immigration and cultural diversity (America in the 1920's) he veined race very differently to today – that he was a pure Anglo-Saxon and deserved better than the lower breeds of humanity, some of this can be seen in his characters and works: The main thrust of the story in 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' regards the inbreeding of humanity with a lower race from the bottom of the sea.

Arguments still continue over his beliefs, over whether he was a product of his time or something worse, and I'm going to avoid chiming in – this delivery of factual content (The views of the main character) would overshadow the main reason for the project, creating the same emotional feeling of dread that the original contained. Where his beliefs would be understood in their original context, they would not be in a modern retelling, or adaptation – they would overshadow the aim of the work and distract form the aesthetics that Lovecraft sought to create.