Claim. Among the various human cultural activities, art is the most central — the essence of culture — and historically new eras have been preceded by new art movements, so reversing today’s decadent art is prerequisite to creating a new culture.
Elaboration. Sang Hun Lee opens the Theory of Art chapter (ut-07-theory-of-art) by ranking art as central among economy, education, religion, science, and art. The claim is structural rather than statistical: art is the emotional/aesthetic register through which a culture expresses its inner image, so when art decays, culture decays. He observes a ‘global tendency towards decadence’ that cuts across democratic vs. former Communist nations and developed vs. developing ones — a deliberately broad diagnosis meant to forestall the objection that decadence is merely a Western or capitalist symptom.
The historical argument runs through two examples. The Renaissance is presented as a period in which artists ‘played a leading role’ in ushering in a new era. More provocatively, Lee cites the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions: Maxim Gorky’s works are credited with substantially contributing to the Russian Revolution and Lu Xun’s to the Chinese Revolution. The rhetorical move is double-edged — Lee is conceding that the Communists were right about the strategic importance of art even as he will later attack their theory of art (socialist realism) as false. Worth a thread once a counter atomic exists: critics will note that this argument cuts both ways — if art creates new eras, then the artist’s worldview (including non-UT worldviews) wields enormous power, which presses against the claim that only Unificationism can produce genuine art.
The practical upshot is that a ‘true art movement must be promoted’ to inaugurate the new cultural society, and this requires ‘a new theory of art’ — namely the Unification Theory of Art that the chapter unfolds. This frames the entire chapter as not merely descriptive aesthetics but providential strategy: aesthetics in service of civilizational renewal, where the future society envisioned by providence is ‘not only true and ethical, but also artistic.’
See also. culture-of-heart-as-true-culture, unificationism-as-unity-of-realism-and-idealism, art-defined-as-emotional-activity-creating-and-appreciating-beauty