#aesthetics

You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#bret-easton-ellis #life #transgressive #beauty

[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

Poverty and loneliness could be seen as a liberation from strivings to become rich and popular. ↗

— Donald Richie

#art #japan #travel #art

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. ↗

— Joan Oliver Goldsmith

#art #art

In the life of the individual, an aesthetic sensibility is both more authentic and more commendable than a political or religious one. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#life

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#cynicism #dead #death #death

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#art #poltics #propaganda #war #art

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

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#art #culture #art

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. ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#art #art