#aesthetics

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#appreciation #hidden-things #wild

In my box of sound bites there are no jackhammers, no snowmobiles, no Jet Skis, no children wailing. Music but no Muzak. It's my box. Put what you want in yours. ↗

— Joan Oliver Goldsmith

#art #art

It was one of God's jokes that such a dumb mind had been put in such an eloquent body. ↗

— Charlaine Harris

#beauty #lust #male-beauty #beauty

Christ is a persuasion, a form evoking desire, and the whole force of the gospel depends upon the assumption that this persuasion is also peace: that the desire awakened by the shape of Christ and his church is one truly reborn as agape, rather than merely the way in which a lesser force succumbs to a greater, as an episode in the endless epic of power. (3) ↗

— David Bentley Hart

#christianity #eastern-orthodox #beauty

In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#life

Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#humanity #literature #reading #age

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#cynicism #dead #death #death

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art #poltics #propaganda #war #art

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. ↗

— Michael Copperman

#authority #culpability #race #representation #art

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. ↗

— Peter Weiss

#art #history #art