Aesthetic Quotes - 4
More Aesthetic Quotes
If you add something to a painting, never let it be for aesthetic reasons. Only let it be for reasons of expression.
asger jorn— Statement to his friend Pierre Alechinsky, between 1965-1970, as quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 115
The law of aesthetics is the same as the law for our desire… Need says: "You must eat." Aesthetics says: "You can do it in a thousand different ways." Ethics: "You need a woman." Aesthetics: "Which woman do you want?" Thus the purpose of art is first and foremost ethical than aesthetic even when the wish becomes need. The goal changes from the general to the individual from need to wish, from ethics to aesthetics.
— Asger Jorn, in Speech to the Penguins (1949)
As an aesthetic surgeon, one simply knows a difficult or dangerous or unhappy patient when one sees one. This learned response to the difficult patient places the surgeon in the position of the psychiatrist. The history of aesthetic surgery runs remarkably parallel to that of psychoanalysis as well as psychosomatic medicine.
sander gilman— Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, page 14.
What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism .
terry eagleton— Chapter 3, 79
It is an assumption that there is always one single dimension for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority. This is the dimension of moral evaluation; “good/evil” is supposed always to trump any other form of evaluation, but that is an assumption, probably the result of the long history of the Christianisation and then gradual de-Christianisation of Europe, which one need not make. Evaluation need not mean moral evaluation, but might include assessments of efficiency, ... simplicity, perspicuousness, aesthetic appeal, and so on.
raymond geuss— p. 39 (Philosophy and Real Politics (2008))
The general misunderstanding of a work of art is often due to the fact that the key to its spiritual content and technical means is missed. Unless the observer is trained to a certain degree in the artistic idiom, he is apt to search for things which have little to do with the aesthetic content of a picture. He is likely to look for pure representational values when the emphasis is really upon music-like relationships.
hans hofmann— "Painting and Culture" p. 56
Beauty is the main positive form of the aesthetic assimilation of reality, in which aesthetic ideal finds it direct expression...
karl marx— Grundrisse (1857/58)
The simultaneity of the disappearance of literature (as aesthetic) and history (as development), which we can observe around us in the academy, points to a fundamental commonality; unraveling one implies unraveling the other, since both are grounded in the same goal-oriented structures that postmodern sensibility opposes. Both civilizational history and autonomous literature are constitutively teleological, dependent on notions of progress toward goals, and they both therefore face resistance from the antidevelopmentalism of contemporary intellectual life.
— Russell Berman, Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007)
Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.
— Richard Courant in: The Australian Mathematics Teacher, Volumes 39-40, Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, 1983, p.3
aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love . Take love away and there is no longer art .
— Remy de Gourmont, in Bartlett's Words to Live By: Advice and Inspiration for Everyday Life
