아름다움과 파멸, 재현된 미적 진리의 두 모습:키츠, 달리, 원폭, 예술의 종언?

Artists capture a scene of life in a particular space, represent the scene in the form of art, and sublimate the captured moment of beauty to a sate of the eternal now. A work of art will continue to exist forever unless destroyed by oxidation, and consequently remain as the truth of beauty. Beauty that transcends time and space, it is what a Romantic poet John Keats calls the ‘truth Art’ that ‘all ye need to know’ in his poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” On the other hand, art works as the products of the times reflect the dark side of human history and memory as well as beautiful moments. Disasters such as war and disease are included here. The Second World War, especially, left us a memory of Holocaust and ‘the fear of nuclear’ which is stamped into the pictures of atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí captures the moment of atomic bombing on canvas. Inspired by the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Dalí painted Three Sphinxes of Bikini which represents what the painter witnessed in person, that is, the nuclear explosion tests conducted on the coral island of Bikini in 1946. In the myth, Sphinx symbolizes ‘wisdom’ but also has the meaning of ‘strangler’. The painting projects the contradictory image of Sphinxes to humans, the hero of paradox who claims to be the most reasonable species on Earth and at the same time tightens his or her own throat with inhumane atrocity of nuclear bombing. This aesthetic representation of a disastrous moment declares, ‘destruction is the truth.’ The A-bomb scene captured in the painting presents itself even here and now, despite half a century’s gap. It makes the ruined life and trauma of the Bikini islanders remain as the truth which has stopped and therefore continues forever towards the eternal now, constantly reminding us of the past memories. Considering the frailty of us humans who are helpless in the destructive power of disasters, the moment of destruction captured in the painting becomes a true insight to the dark reality. In Three Sphinxes of Bikini, Dalí reaches the insight that ‘destruction is the truth’ and that it is ‘all ye need to know.’ Likewise, Beauty, sublimated by Keats as the truth of art, relinquishes its position to Destruction which is sublimated by Dalí as the of art. As a result, we are facing the double edge of truth, beauty and destruction.