#esthetic

A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic. ↗

— Beatrice Wood

#except #harvard #his #mind #poet

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

— Walter Benjamin

#art #poltics #propaganda #war #art

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

— Alfred North Whitehead

#art #enjoyment #experience #imposing #our

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

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. ↗

— Gaston Bachelard

#books #imagination #literary #lover #object

Actors aren't stupid, mostly, and if there's a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director's going for, if you're aware of that too, you can do things to help that. ↗

— Alan Cumming

#aware #director #going #help #mostly