"Esoteric Art," a Lecture by Michael Clune

By“esoteric” I refer to the value an artwork has apart from its value to an audience. To describe the fundamental features of this kind of esoteric art, I will focus on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 tale “The Artist of the Beautiful,” which presents it ekphrastically. Hawthorne’s untimely dissent from Romantic aesthetics, spurred by his experience of the obscurity faced by a serious writer in 19thcentury America, produced a seed which would only begin to germinate in the 20thcentury. After analyzing his tale, I will then consider the significance of the model it presents for philosophical aesthetics. I will also examine the relation of esoteric art to the occult, the hermetic, and, more generally, to art’s primordial cultic dimension.

Michael Clune writes about memory, literature, money, and music. Sometimes he works in creative nonfiction and fiction; some problems require academic methods. He believes that literary style isn’t decoration but a form of knowledge.

His creative books include a novel (Pan, forthcoming from Penguin in Summer 2025), and a work of creative nonfiction, Gamelife (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). The tenth anniversary edition of his memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin appeared in 2023 from McNally Editions.

His most recent critical book is A Defense of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Other monographs include Writing Against Time (Stanford University Press, 2013) and American Literature and the Free Market (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

His essays have appeared in Harper’s—where he is a contributing editor—Critical Inquiry, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The Atlantic, Best American Essays, PMLA, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations, and his books have appeared on “best of the year” lists from The New Yorker, NPR, and elsewhere.

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