#esthetic

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction. ↗

— Steven Soderbergh

#another #fiction #form #just #moment

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

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

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

I think it's more accurate to think of aesthetics as a key ingredient in a recipe, as opposed to the icing on the cake. ↗

— Stephen P. Anderson

#interaction-design #ixd #user-experience #ux #design

[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