Word: aestheticized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
High art, we are taught, resides in the lower depths. Misery breeds profundity, the argument goes, and it has a corollary: anything cheery is a gilded lie. Drizzle is real, sunlight a sham. To focus on the sunny side, and to find resonance there, is to engage in a kind...
Similarly the spotted owl. I am no enemy of the owl. If it could be preserved at no or little cost, I would agree: the variety of nature is a good, a high aesthetic good. But it is no more than that. And sometimes aesthetic goods have to be sacrificed...
The important distinction is between those environmental goods that are fundamental and those that are merely aesthetic. Nature is our ward. It is not our master. It is to be respected and even cultivated. But it is man's world. And when man has to choose between his well-being...
Now the concept of a "mainstream" is a phantom, an artifact of overcategorizing minds. The Tiber as a symbol of aesthetic transmission has been replaced by the Everglades. The idea of the "mainstream" is kept alive by pluralists, rather as Stalin maintained the memory of Trotsky -- as a bogey. But...
The catalog's nagging about the "mainstream" seems all the more pointless because Bearden possessed a deep aesthetic education: he was immersed in the self-sufficient culture of Western painting from Giotto right through to his own time, as well as in African art. It may be that curator Sharon...