#aesthetics

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

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#cynicism #dead #death #death

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#aesthetics #consumerism #photography #society #experience

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b. ↗

— Ariana Reines

#baudelaire #philip-guston #sentimentality #intelligence

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#art #culture #art

In the past an artist produced things that were necessary socially; they were instruments, albeit of a special kind, that helped the dead reach eternity, spells to be cast, prayers to be liturgically fleshed. . . . The aesthetic component of those instruments enhanced their function but was never central, never an independent, nonutilitarian thing. ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#art #art

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent. ↗

— Roger Scruton

#beauty #classic #style #beauty

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