#esthetic

The asymmetry of power that cuteness revolves around is another compelling reminder of how aesthetic categories register social conflict. There can be no experience of any person or object as cute that does not somehow call up the subject’s sense of power over those who are less powerful. But, as Lori Merish underscores, the fact that the cute object seems capable of making an affective demand on the subject—a demand for care that the subject is culturally as well as biologically compelled to fulfill—is already a sign that “cute” does not just denote a static power differential, but rather a dynamic and complex power struggle. ↗

— Sianne Ngai

#cute #experience

I endeavored to renounce society, that I might avoid temptation. But it was a poor religion; so far as it prevailed, only tended to make me gloomy, stupid, unsociable, and useless. ↗

— John Newton

#legalism #temptation #religion

I think decor says a lot about someone's social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work - and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story. ↗

— Pedro Almodovar

#aesthetic #also #chosen #i #i think

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind. ↗

— Clive Bell

#alliance #art #between #circumstance #ecstasy

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#art #culture #art

I don't make records that way, where I'm trying to please the marketplace or anything. Not because I have anything against that, it's just never been a part of my aesthetic, even when I was with the Pixies. ↗

— Frank Black

#against #anything #because #been #even

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity. ↗

— Stanley Crouch

#aspects #class #country #ethnic #identity

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

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done. ↗

— Adam Savage

#behind #build #childhood #do-it-yourself #done

Aesthetic matters are fundamental for the harmonious development of both society and the individual. ↗

— Friedrich Schiller

#both #development #fundamental #harmonious #individual