{"quotes":[{"text":"When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.","author":"Peter Coyote","tags":["aesthetics","artists","poetry","rebellion"],"id":6729,"author_id":"Peter+Coyote"},{"text":"There was a product which seemed attractive, expensive, portable, beautiful and simple. Everybody talked about its beauty but they bought it for it's simplicity.","author":"Amit Kalantri","tags":["aesthetic","aesthetics","amit-kalantri","amit-kalantri","amit-kalantri-writer","beauty","bought","business","buying","customers","expenditure","expensive","inspirational","manufacturing","marketing","money","motivational","philosophy","portable","product","product-design","product-selling","purchase","retail-business","sale","shopping","simple","simplicity","wisdom"],"id":17737,"author_id":"Amit+Kalantri"},{"text":"All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.","author":"Walter Benjamin","tags":["aesthetics","art","poltics","propaganda","war"],"id":22771,"author_id":"Walter+Benjamin"},{"text":"Things wabi-sabi have no need for the reassurance of status or the validation of market culture. They have no need for documentation of provenance. Wabi-sabi-ness in no way depends on knowledge of the creator's background or personality. In fact, it is best if the creator is no distinction, invisible, or anonymous.","author":"Leonard Koren","tags":["aesthetics","creativity","wabi-sabi"],"id":31278,"author_id":"Leonard+Koren"},{"text":"And is not all of life material- based on the material- permeated by the material? Should not one learn, gladly, to utilize the beauty of the fine material? I do not speak of the gross crudities of soporific television, of loud brash convertibles and vulgar display- but rather of grace and line and refinement- and there are wonderful and exciting things that only money can buy, such as theater tickets, books, paintings, travel, lovely clothes- and why deny them when one can have them? The only problem is to work, to stay awake mentally and physically, and NEVER become mentally, physically, spiritually flabby or over complacent!","author":"Elizabeth Winder","tags":["aesthetics","beauty","classics","fashion","purist"],"id":32181,"author_id":"Elizabeth+Winder"},{"text":"A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty.","author":"Jean-Jacques Rousseau","tags":["aesthetics","honesty","luxury","ostentation","philosophy","wealth"],"id":34183,"author_id":"Jean-Jacques+Rousseau"},{"text":"Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.","author":"Theodor W. Adorno","tags":["aesthetics","philosophy"],"id":41000,"author_id":"Theodor+W.+Adorno"},{"text":"The answer to these questions is tied to the public's attitude about suicide. For many people, suicide is morally reprehensible. It's against their religion, or against their culture, or contrary to their personal values. Like other unpleasant subjects - incest, disease, discrimination - it's avoided.","author":"John Bateson","tags":["aesthetics","harsh-religious-positions","suicide"],"id":43815,"author_id":"John+Bateson"},{"text":"Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names; and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved, on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert. I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was, to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden. So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace, besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim. But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it. The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that they retain their childish illusion about their Albert Memorial. I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a special curse was laid on those who can become like little children. And I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like; a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel. But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place; the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things. And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily, they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["aesthetics","criticism","hypocrisy","taste","worship"],"id":46365,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["aesthetics","death","efficiency","evil","good","insanity","journalism","manners"],"id":68530,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":95,"pages":10,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}