Claim. Unificationism is a new artistic style that unifies idealism and realism centered on God’s Heart and the purpose of creation — depicting humans struggling within the real sinful world while longing for the original ideal world, with love between man and woman centered on God’s love and the love of the True Parents.
Elaboration. After cataloguing eight historical schools (Idealism, Classicism, Romanticism, Realism/Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism), Lee proposes a ninth: Unificationism (Various Styles, and the Schools of Artistic Creation). Its defining structure is the unity of idealism and realism centered on the purpose-of-creation.
The realist commitment: ‘Since Unificationism seeks to realize the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, it regards reality as important. Accordingly, Unificationism has a pronounced sense of realism.’ But realism alone would lock the artist into depicting the fallen world. So the idealist commitment is added: ‘It strives, even while living in the real world to return to the original ideal world.’ The synthesis: ‘The unity of reality and the ideal becomes the Unificationist attitude of creation.’ Example: ‘Unificationism would depict the image of a human being motivated by hope, seeking to overcome all hardships in the actual sinful world, all the while longing for the original ideal world.’
Unificationism is also called ‘Heartism’ — ‘a theory centered on God’s Heart.’ This means Unificationism includes romantic elements (the expression of ideal love centered on God) but is not romanticism in the historical sense. When dealing with love between man and woman, it depicts ideal-and-realistic love ‘centered on God’s love and on the love of the true-parents of humankind.’ This is the explicit insertion of the True Parents doctrine into aesthetic theory — the love-form portrayed in genuine Unificationist art is not generic eros but the specific structure of conjugal love patterned on True Parents.
Lee adds a second sense of the unity claim: in broad terms, every past ‘idealism’ (forward-looking, seeking to give rise to something new) eventually hardened into a ‘realism’ (currently fashionable in its period). Unificationism is the unity of realism and idealism in this historical sense too. But unlike past styles, ‘this style of Unificationism, which is a style patterned after God’s creative act centered on Heart and on the purpose of creation, is basically unchangeable and eternal, even though there may be some differences based on the individualities of different artists.’ This claim of eternal unchangeability is striking — it positions Unificationism not as another style in a sequence but as the final style, the aesthetic correlate of the Kingdom. Worth a thread once a counter atomic exists: this exempts Unificationism from the historical dynamic Lee just identified, which raises the question of how the framework would diagnose its own future obsolescence if any occurred.
See also. object-consciousness-five-attitudes-of-the-artist, culture-of-heart-as-true-culture, art-is-essence-of-culture-and-precedes-new-eras