#aesthetic

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#aesthetics #consumerism #photography #society #experience

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 want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b. ↗

— Ariana Reines

#baudelaire #philip-guston #sentimentality #intelligence

I don't think it's possible to touch people's imagination today by aesthetic means. ↗

— J. G. Ballard

#i #imagination #means #people #possible

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic. A Buick radiator grille is as much a political statement as a Rolls Royce radiator grille, one enshrining a machine aesthetic driven by a populist optimism, the other enshrining a hierarchical and exclusive social order. ↗

— J. G. Ballard

#change #cultural #driven #exclusive #great

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

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. ↗

— Helena Christensen

#beauty #beholder #country #different #every

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

I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise. ↗

— Leo Kottke

#dealing #exercise #expensive #i #i think

The film is a direct mirror of the director. If your director doesn't know how to dress, there will be an aesthetic of the film that won't come through - whether it's in the costumes if he doesn't know exactly what he wants or the look of the film. ↗

— Channing Tatum

#come #costumes #direct #director #dress