Wondering whether the rebellion of Russian formalism (and of all other formalisms to follow in its footsteps) is not indirectly a rebellion against the bitter pill of the ancient Platonic sentence against art as twice removed from reality, which even Aristotle's somewhat less damning view of art as cathartic mimesis did little to sweeten? To all those who thought form was just decoration, formalists of all denominations respond: wait a minute, content is nothing, what matters is form. But at the same time they indirectly respond to those (much older statements) that deprecate art's content merely because it isn't 'true'. In a world where art's main attributes are formal, the truthiness™* of art's content would cease to be reason for philosophical contempt.
*Truthiness is a Stephen Colbert trademark.
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