#esthetic

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity. ↗

— Frank Leahy

#egotism #pain #stupidity

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic ↗

— James Branch Cabell

#cynicism #dead #death #death

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself. ↗

— Roberto Burle Marx

#aesthetic #also #artist #color #complex

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

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. ↗

— Michael Copperman

#authority #culpability #race #representation #art

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

— Peter Weiss

#art #history #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

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

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

— Gaston Bachelard

#books #imagination #literary #lover #object