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This essay offers an alternate understanding of Macedonio's place in art history, focusing on a posthumously published essay, "Para una teoría del arte" (c. 1927), in which Macedonio sketches a general theory of art and investigates the particular qualities of arts such as music, silent film, painting, and prose writing. In this essay, Macedonio conceptualizes art in terms of emotion: the artfulness of a work of art is grounded in its capacity to elicit a unique category of emotional experiences in viewers, readers, and listeners. Importantly, he insists that this emotional experience is only possible if each of the arts, such as painting, music, silent film, and prose writing, remain strictly within its own domain. Combinations of the arts are, as Macedonio puts it, "monstruos" (242), and the power of a work is directly linked to the artist's exclusive employment of the single, unique technique that defines her chosen art: "un arte es una sola técnica excluida para los demás," and "cuanto más artes diferentes se asocian menor es su poder" (237). In "Para una teoría del arte," Macedonio's pursuit of a general concept of art leads him to harden the boundaries separating the arts, rather than break them down, pushing him toward a vision of art that bears important similarities to the formalist and medium-specific understandings of modernism that rose to prominence in the middle decades of the twentieth century in the works of critics such as Clement Greenberg.
