Editor�s Note: The distinguished sociology professor, author of numerous articles and books, and the great patriot on behalf of Ethiopia, Professor Donald Levine of the University of Chicago had written a short note on his reading of the essay by Tecola W. Hagos titled �New Version, Bonsai Ethiopia: Aesthetic Beauty and Artistic Beauty [A Diversion from Fixation on Politics]� posted on May 10, 2010 in this Website. Professor Levine has graciously permitted me to share his precious insights with my readers. I have herein posted the short but profound comment of Levine. I invite all to participate in a discourse on Aesthetics and Philosophy using this Website as a Forum. Many thanks to you all. TH

Ijjig betam woud Tecola!

I am glad you wrote this piece let alone shared it with me. It touches many spots where I live, as you doubtless intuited.  My own particular affinity for aesthetics used to lie with music, yet I have enormous if ungratified yearnings to immerse myself in all the worlds of aesthetics as of art.

Your gloss on Danto's error�he should have said "'the end of artists' and the birth of celebrities rather than the 'end of art'��was worth the price of admission. The ascendance of celebrities is one of the prices we pay for the commodification of everything.  But to be honest, in their day Handel, Mozart, Chopin, and many others were also celebrities in their own right.

I would add "the birth of technical wizards" as well.  When my younger son, now deeply ensconced in bringing Green Technology to Ethiopia , got deeply into electronic music decades ago, I told him I worried that the new universe of music would become pure technology as the expense of musicality.  Fortunately, his own soul is so deeply and profoundly musical and artistic he did not give in, but 95% of those whom he knew in the Los Angeles ambience are just that, he affirms.

When Wax and Gold first appeared, one of the reviewers wrote: "How refreshing it is to have the truth. Levine openly admits that what drew him to Ethiopia was its aesthetic appeal"�one of the comments I cherish most over the decades.  Before that, my very first publication on Ethiopia was entitled "On Conceptions of Time and Space in the Amhara Worldview."  And so it was no surprise to me, albeit to many of my readers, when I produced the piece on the talented and stirring painter Fikru Gebre Mariam, which appeared in Tadias and The Ethiopian American some while ago. 

Among philosophers of art whom I cherish John Dewey stands out. His insistence that aesthetic form represents a kind of sublimation of the beauty of everyday experience helps me honor the otherwise disruptive turn of your piece to Ethiopian politics.  And then to transcend that apparent disruption. True, Lenin claimed he would have spent more time listening to Beethoven had he not been so passionately engrossed in the demands of politics�and thereby brought more damage to the world than nearly anyone else in the 20th century.  Imagine if Lenin had only a spent a half-hour a day listening to the late Beethoven quartets.  To say that, following Dewey, is not to say that the experience of music, like the Bonsai experience, should simply offer an escape from crusty political realities.  It should inform and elevate them, and lead us to epiphanies, as you so finely suggest, in the courage of being wherever and however manifest.

Liben/Donald Levine

June 17, 2010

Chicago , Illinois