The Dehumanization of Art by José Ortega y Gasset
Published 1925 · 30,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Essays, Art Criticism
How hard is The Dehumanization of Art to read?
The Dehumanization of Art scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Aesthetic and phenomenological terminology, with reference across painting, music, poetry and theatre assumed rather than explained.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Elegant essayistic Spanish with extended analogies, kept accessible by Ortega's journalistic training.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- A theory of aesthetic perception and historical style operating almost entirely at the level of categories.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Compact, allusive and rapid, moving across Cubism, Impressionism, Mallarmé, Wagner, Pirandello and Proust in a few dozen pages.
- Narrative indirection: 34 out of 100
- The thesis is announced early and restated; the essay is transparent about what it claims.
- Symbolic density: 54 out of 100
- The deathbed seen by four observers is the governing figure and does most of the argument's work by itself.
- Ironic distance: 66 out of 100
- Ortega describes an art built on irony in a tone that keeps the reader unsure whether he is its advocate or its coroner.
- Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
- He declines to say whether the dehumanisation of art is a gain or a loss, and ends by suggesting the question cannot yet be answered.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- A sequence of short titled sections building a single argument, more lecture than treatise.
How The Dehumanization of Art is regarded
The Dehumanization of Art holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.