#aesthetic

At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet’s fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women ↗

— August Strindberg

#art #food #inspiration #love #poetry

Critical art is an art that aims to produce a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its transformation. This schema, very simple in appearance, is actually the conjunction of three processes: first, the production of a sensory form of 'strangeness'; second, the development of an awareness of the reason for that strangeness and third, a mobilization of individuals as a result of that awareness. ↗

— Jacques Rancière

#critical-art #dissensus #ethical-immediacy #representational-mediation #art

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. ↗

— Susanne K. Langer

#music #philosophy #symbolism #art

High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life. ↗

— Joseph Epstein

#art #life #snobbery #art

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. ↗

— T.J. Clark

#art #art-history #art

In the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness. ↗

— Clarice Lispector

#art #beauty #good #truth #art

You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#bret-easton-ellis #life #transgressive #beauty

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds, ↗

— Ross Wetzsteon

#art #artist #barnett-newman #painting #art

People define themselves aesthetically at a very young age. ↗

— Thom Filicia

#age #define #people #themselves #very

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal. ↗

— Louis de Bernières

#art #beauty #fascism #art