Aristokracy

The Aristokracy is a loosely organised collective of artists, musicians, performers, writers, and poets who place emphasis on the role of the transcendent in the arts.

There is no formal structure to our organisation and participants are encouraged to get as creative as they wish in regards to the website.

The Aristrokracy website project is designed to exist (in its complete form) as a 'organic' website - meaning that it will be forever changing, and that pages created for individual members can (and should be) postulated on an individual basis.

The term Aristokracy holds its roots in Ancient Greek aesthetic theory, as is found in the mythology of the double Gods of the Creative Principle in the Greek Tradition: namely Apollo and his twin Dionysus.

Although fundamentally representative of the same process, Apollo and Dionysus are also in a constant state of bipolar opposition, as is exemplified in the flowing dichotomy.

Apollo - Intellect, Reason, Sculpture, Artificial Beauty, Enstasy, Exoteric, Order, Boundaries
Dionysus - Will, Instinct, Music, Natural beauty, Ecstasy, Esoteric, Chaos, Transgression

In such regards the Apollonian creative process is that which adheres to form and tradition; the Dionsyian impulse is the one which transgresses boundaries - often destroying old ideas in the process. Only when the two impluses are balanced is the creative process complete.

The name Aristokracy is derived from the Greek aristokratia, meaning the rule of the best – meaning that the creative principle is exalted only when these two forces (the Apollonian & the Dionysian) exist in harmony.

The Aristokratic principle then, is a fusion of the two creative forces in humanity, and can only be realized when both principles exist in perfect balance and not as counter forces within a work.  We have chosen to spell Aristokracy with a 'k' to distinguish ourselves from the more earthly and mundane deployment of the term.

 We approach the arts as a spiritual technique and not as mere craft – thus rendering production of art as an expression of the will of artist, with every creation as an act of birth….

Collective Inspirations

Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, Richard Wagner, Johann Sebastian Bach, Aleister Crowley, Julius Evola, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Comte de Lautréamont/Isidore Lucien Ducasse, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, Roland Barthes, Leonardo DaVinci, Diogenes, F.T. Marinetti, Laozi, Henry David Thoreau, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Hans Christian Anderson, Carlos Castenada, Knut Hamsun, Gustave Moreau, William S. Burroughs, Brian John Peter Ferneyhough, Nicholas Roerich, Francisco Goya, Gustav Mahler, Emily Dickinson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Jean Moréas, Stephane Mallarme, Sappho, Henry Fuseli, Gustav Klimt, Emile Cioran, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Hermann Hesse, Iannis Xenakis, Terence Kemp McKenna, Timothy Leary, Hieronymus Bosch, Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky, Jacob Grimm, Max Stirner, H.P. Lovecraft, Socrates, Rudolf Steiner, Lars von Trier, John Milton Cage Jr., Takashi Miike, HR Giger, David Herbert Richards Lawrence, Aldous Leonard Huxley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michel Houellebecq, Abhinavagupta, Rabinath Tagore, Dylan Thomas, Pierre Boulez, Ramprasad Sen, Kabīr