beauty changes everything
People prefer what is familiar to them. Scholars call this the "mere exposure effect." Philosopher Bence Nanay explains: "The more you are exposed to something, the more you tend to like it. Just the mere exposure to something changes your preferences. And this happens even if you are not aware of what you are exposed … Continue reading Seeking the Familiar with a Twist
The relation between morality and beauty continues to capture attention. Philosophers, especially moralists like Anthony Cooper (aka Shaftesbury), connected the ability to comprehend beauty to a person's virtue. Making this explicit, Shaftesbury referred to this innate ability to understand beauty as the moral sense. Part of the basis for this belief was the idea that … Continue reading Virtue and the Beautiful
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?
One of the more fascinating books I’ve read recently is Lauren F. Klein’s An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States. Klein writes that “in the late colonial era and into the early republic, America’s cultural and political leaders identified a causal relation between the cultivation of the American palate and … Continue reading Eating and the Tasteful Subject
A previous post discussed the importance of considering aesthetics in business from the book Aesthetic Intelligence: How to Boost It and Use It in Business and Beyond by Pauline Brown. I wanted to follow up that entry with some insights from this book on how to develop aesthetic intelligence, specifically how to better curate your … Continue reading Aesthetic Intelligence, Part 2
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
Beauty, and aesthetics more generally, is often considered to be nonessential. A pragmatic person may think aesthetics are unimportant, if something works. A humanitarian may think what's really important is that people are fed, clothed, and sheltered. A medical person may believe that health is the key concern for people. While all these elements are … Continue reading Aesthetic Intelligence, Part 1
Theories of aesthetic taste have been developed in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and sociology. But market and consumer research has not spent as much time developing theories of aesthetics taste to put into their different practices. Wayne D. Hoyer and Nicola E. Stokburger-Sauer opened this discussion in their article, "The Role of Aesthetic Taste … Continue reading Consumer Taste
I have long-believed that aesthetics should be part of our everyday lives, and then philosophers started publishing books and articles about this idea I took for granted. However, I see that the literature in aesthetics did not always warrant such a conclusion, especially with an overwhelming focus on the arts. The "Everyday Aesthetics" movement in … Continue reading Quotidian Aesthetics: The Design Paradigm
Natural selection is the process organisms adapt to their environment to give them a better chance at survival. Though he proposed and defended this theory, Charles Darwin did not believe it could explain everything. That's why he also proposed sexual selection, by which he meant that females choose the most appealing males and males evolve … Continue reading Extravagant Evolution