I Love the World
April 21st, 2008 | Published in Videos, Beauty, Nature, Science, Art and Design
This is a great commercial:
Beauty
Everyone cannot have good taste (Heath & Potter)
December 21st, 2007 | Published in Beauty, Quotes, Culture, Art and Design
Because taste is grounded in the sense of distinction, it follows that not everyone can have good taste. It is a conceptual impossibility (just as not all students can have above-average grades)…. Thus “good taste” shifts towards more inaccessible, less familiar styles.
–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125
The superiority of good taste (Heath & Potter)
December 15th, 2007 | Published in Beauty, Life, Quotes, Culture, Art and Design
Good taste confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor. This is the primary reason that, in our society, people from different social classes do not freely interact with one another. They cannot stand each other’s taste. More specifically, the people who are higher up in the social hierarchy are utterly contemptuous of everything that the people beneath them enjoy (movies, sports, television shows, music, etc.).
–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 125
Beauty is meaningless (Orwell)
August 4th, 2007 | Published in Philosophy, Beauty, Quotes
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
–George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), p. 57
Art is what it is (Berry)
July 23rd, 2007 | Published in Beauty, Poetry, Quotes, Art and Design
You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117
Solution to mystery (Berry)
April 4th, 2007 | Published in Beauty, Science, Quotes
As soon as a mystery is scheduled for solution, it is no longer a mystery; it is a problem.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 36
Convenience and destruction; usefulness and beauty (White)
February 19th, 2007 | Published in Ecology, Beauty, Consumerism, Quotes, Culture, Art and Design
[Thoreau] would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.
–E. B. White, “A Slight Sound at Evening” (1954) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), 241