#aesthetics

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties. ↗

— Harold Bloom

#anxiety #canon #literature #age

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ↗

— Leonard Bernstein

#art #creativity #epiphanic-moment #epiphany #inspirational

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#philosophy #art

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

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#art #creation #creativity #perception #self-knowledge

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. ↗

— Adam Phillips

#art #philosophy #secrets #truth #art

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. ↗

— Theodor W. Adorno

#philosophy #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