aesthetics

Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism__nd the creative scenes therein__layed an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of __omewhere_ predated the Internet__ seeming invention of __verywhere_ (which often ends up feeling like __owhere_)

Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the *sublime* and that of the *beautiful*. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton's portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror; on the other hand, the sight of flower strewn meadows, valleys with winding brooks and covered with grazing flocks, the description of Elysium, or Homer's portrayal of the girdle of Venus, also occasion a pleasant sensation but one that is joyous and smiling. In order that the former impression could occur to us in due strength, we must have *a feeling of the sublime*, and, in order to enjoy the latter well, *a feeling of the beautiful*. Tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove are sublime; flower beds, low hedges and trees trimmed in figures are beautiful. Night is sublime; day is beautiful. Temperaments that possess a feeling for the sublime are drawn gradually, by the quiet stillness of a summer evening as the shimmering light of the stars breaks through the brown shadows of night and the lonely moon rises into view, into high feelings of friendship, of disdain for the world, of eternity. The shining day stimulates busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime *moves*, the beautiful *charms*.

Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.

The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.

God's pleasure--the beauty creation possesses in his regard--underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.

And if, as all philosophers on the subject have noted, art is a human activity that relies on the senses to reach the soul, did it not also stand to reason that dogs -- at least dogs of Mr. Bones' caliber -- would have it in them to feel a similar aesthetic impulse? Would they not, in other words, be able to appreciate art? As far as Willy knew, no one had ever thought of this before. Did that make him the first man in recorded history to believe such a thing was possible? No matter. It was an idea whose time had come. If dogs were beyond the pull of oil paintings and string quartets, who was to say they wouldn't respond to an art based on the sense of smell? Why not an olfactory art? Why not an art for dogs that dealt with the world as dogs knew it?

there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust

In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.

[I]t was [Barnett] Newman who made the famously wry remark, __esthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,

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.

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity,inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism.

Tensurrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness.

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.

I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.