beauty changes everything
Theories of taste ran rampant in the eighteenth century, but things have settled down a bit in academic circles. Despite all the books on aesthetics, few people (if any) have offered new theories of aesthetic taste. Yet we live in a time where the exercise of taste has become quite pervasive. Content creators and audiences … Continue reading What is Aesthetic Taste?
Art is supposed to express, rebuke, symbolize, inform, provoke, and so on. Few (if any) say that art is to just exist, and Jaume Plensa is one of them. As a sculptor, he says that he wants his work to exist, "to create beauty without any component of business in it." In this 2015 interview, … Continue reading Jaume Plensa: Sculptor of Beauty
Bence Nanay published his book, Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, with Oxford University Press in 2019. Below you can read the opening paragraphs of my review of it for the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, and find a link to the full pdf. Opening to the review: With hundreds of titles in Oxford’s Very … Continue reading Review of Aesthetics by Bence Nanay
Guest post by Venkat Ramanan The adjective “ineffable” appears to be used mostly in relation to either (a) a spiritual/mystical experience or (b) when we appreciate a work of visual or plastic art. Here are some examples of (a) - The British writer Karen Armstrong described Laozi (the Chinese philosopher from the 6th century BCE) … Continue reading Aesthetic Ineffability and the Rebirth of the Reader
In his book, Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, Bence Nanay writes, "What all things aesthetic have in common is something very simple: the way you're exercising your attention" (p.22). To illustrate what he means, Nanay uses as an example the painting The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Landscape with the Fall of … Continue reading Attention to Beauty
Because you celebrate Black culture does not mean that you don't like white culture; or that you putting it down.It's just taking pride- Solange Knowles, “Interlude: Tina Taught Me” Victoria Lynn Awkward, “Sand (Group),” 2019. Photo courtesy of Victoria Lynn Awkward. What does it mean to be inclusive and diverse? We have committees, departments, policies, … Continue reading Collective Individuals: A Review of Sand
In 1961, the Sursock Museum opened, according to the will of Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock. He wanted to leave his estate as a museum to help define the public taste in Lebanon. Maru Pabón reviews a recent exhibition titled Ten Stories from the Sursock Museum Collection 1923 – 2016. It is set up as ten stories (or … Continue reading Lebanon’s Sursock Museum
The Urbano Project in Jamaica Plain (Boston) has a wonderful show by artist Constanza Aguirre, on view from November 9, 2018 through January 11, 2019. Her art explores the relationship that people have with work. What happens when displaced people are thereby prevented from working? Do they become less human? In my art review (see … Continue reading Review of Wandering in the Land of Oblivion
Here is my review of Temple of Mnemon, a sculpture by Anne Lilly that was installed on the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston from the summer to October of 2018. This review was published in Big Red & Shiny, Boston's contemporary art journal online. The opening paragraph of the review: Part of what makes us … Continue reading Review of Temple of Mnemon
It has become increasingly common to use the word 'aesthetics' when really talking about art. While it is true that many works of art are beautiful or have other aesthetic properties, most people claim to deny that aesthetics is a necessary component of art. One just has to think about Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917); he claimed … Continue reading Aesthetics Versus Philosophy of Art