164 Quotes About Aesthetics

Back then, I was still just a fan of music. And to be a fan of music also meant to be a fan of cities, of places. Regionalism—and the creative scenes therein—played an important role in the identification and contextualization of a sound or aesthetic. Music felt married to place, and the notion of “somewhere” predated the Internet’s seeming invention of “everywhere” (which often ends up feeling like “nowhere”)

It's hard to combine a simple life with a love of aesthetics.

In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.

We pay a small fortune for a variegated monstera whose epidermis is unevenly colored.However, we pay a small fortune for skin creams that promise to make our epidermis evenly colored.

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle.

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.

In a single wave of meaning the triumphant purity of being.

Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.