Aesthetic Icons Quotes

Brutalist architecture was Modernism's angry underside, and was never, much as some would rather it were, a mere aesthetic style. It was a political aesthetic, an attitude, a weapon, dedicated to the precept that nothing was too good for ordinary people. Now, after decades of neglect, it's devided between 'eyesores' and 'icons'; fine for the Barbican's stockbrokers but unacceptable for the ordinary people who were always its intended clients.

Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?

Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.

Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice.

No, you have been brought up with the lies that books have told you, and granted they are far more comforting and aesthetically pleasing than the truth. I will not rip the illusion from you. Keep it, hold it, love it, let it give solace on dark days. Let the truth die a noble death, with no marker, no troubadours singing its songs, no glorious parades or the trotting out of its many lustrous icons on saint days. Let the truth die with the man who holds it. If there was anything I learned while teaching, it is that truth is overrated. The lies are just as, if not more, beautiful and poetic. And after centuries, if the lies have survived, they become the truth, as such.

Vischer’s idea of a back and forth between projecting the self and internalizing the world—what he called a “direct continuation of the external sensation into an internal one”—influenced generations of philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetic theorists. To describe his radical new concept, he used the German word Einfühlung, literally “feeling-in.” When psychological works influenced by Vischer began to be translated into English in the early twentieth century, the language needed a new term for this new idea, and translators invented the word empathy. It is pretty shocking to realize that empathy is barely a hundred years old, about the same age as X-rays and lie-detector tests.

Petre's commitment to Roman Catholicism combined with her openness to mental and moral subjectivism formed a rare alchemy among early twentieth-century Catholics. Her exposure to thinkers like Nietzsche did not strip her of her faith. She argued that despite Nietzsche's professed atheism, his life and thought offered much for Catholics to admire. His was a 'strenuous,' 'suffering,' 'unselfish' 'life militant' marked by 'purity, integrity, [and] utter unworldliness.' Despite being the sweetheart of libertine artists and writers, Nietzsche criticized the decadence and pessimism of modern aesthetics. Likewise, the goal of his celebration of free will and his critique of sin was not an orgiastic 'self-abandonment, but ... strong self-possession; a mastering of one's own life and conduct' and a recognition that true contrition is not legislated from without but cultivated from within a deep reverence for the 'mysterious laws of our being.' Petre insisted that in Nietzsche, Catholics could find a fellow seeker of moral strenuousness: 'There is to be here no dilettantism, but sheer hard work.

Like all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it will nevertheless soon be gone, leaving behind an immense museum of artificial art and abandoning the field completely to advertising. A dizzying eclecticism of form, a dizzying eclecticism of pleasure - such, already, was the agenda of the baroque. For the baroque, however, the vortex of artifice has a fleshly aspect. Like the practitioners of the baroque, we too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts - not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images - be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images - are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared. The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form - the erasure, though still in the form of art, of all aesthetic syntax. Similarly, the fascination of trans sexuality is the erasure - though in the form of spectacle - of sexual difference. These are images that conceal nothing, that reveal nothing - that have a kind of negative intensity. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. Just as Byzantine icons made it possible to stop asking whether God existed - without, for all that, ceasing to believe in him.

Regardless of the medium, performance artists explicitly explore and enact their holistic autonomies and interiorities (gendered, spiritual, emotional, and political), not simply their bodily corporeality. If this process takes place within a recorded electronic or digital environment, it is the medium that is virtual, unreal or disembodied, not the human performer within it. In the performance arts, whether in a theater, on a street corner, or on a computer monitor, the medium is not the message (and never has been); the performer is. [. . .] The dislocation and fragmentation of the body in digital performance is an aesthetic praxis which deconstructive critics have hungrily grasped and mythologized, holding up the virtual body as the central icon (immaterial, disembodied), whereas in actuality, it operates as an index, as another trace and representation of the always already physical body.

A great perfume can express the intangible, but essential, intentions of a designer and convey the constant, enduring, and driving identity of the fashion house. It was through Marc Rosen's advocacy that I came to realize that the greatest modern perfume bottles were an art reflecting art. They exist as design objects in their own right, but are directly responsive to the composition of the scents they hold. A perfume, based on a series of layers and combinations of scent and composed of "notes" in a system that is at once science and subjectivity, is dependent on the sensory and the intuitive. With evocative qualities that are an amalgam of references framing it conceptually, a perfume can inspire possibilities of representation through graphics and the form of its flacon. Perfume bottles reside at the intersection of aesthetics and technology. They are, at their most artful, the sculptural manifestations of the ideas, emotions, and poetry elicited by a fragrance.

Distinguishing between good and bad metaphors is not whether human attributes can be applied to nonhuman things, but whether the metaphor as model accurately relays some truth about the nature of the nonhuman world.

According to conceptual metaphor theory, we understand abstract concepts in terms of concretely embodied image and orienting schemata, so that we perceive ideas like love and justice in terms of paths and balances, construing love as a journey and justice as weighing scales.

In conceptual integration theory, we create new emergent structure from fusing or blending shared topology from different domains, whether they are abstract or concrete.

Metaphoring enables us to keep separate the elements of its domains at the same time we derive new meaning from their projection into a new, blended space.

Discussions of the role of metaphor in poetry necessarily focus on the conceptual and linguistic levels, since the underlying sensate level that is below the level of consciousness cannot be articulated directly.

Although it is the sensory-motor-emotive level that motivates the poet, whose cognitive processes of creativity work upward from the roots through the trunk to the leaves of the cognitive metaphor tree, the respondents to a poem work downwards from the linguistic leaves through the conceptual trunk to its sensory-motor-emotive roots.

When one focuses on metaphor as product, problems surface as to whether a metaphor should be considered as a testable model of reality or taken literally when used poetically. On the other hand, focusing on the metaphor as process shows how metaphorising is hierarchical in nature, from the cognitive levels of subliminally sensate to conceptual to linguistic expression.

In art forms, instead of focusing on metaphor usage within a poem, I conceive of metaphoring as the generic structure of blending theory that enables the creation of the poem as an icon of something beyond itself.

Poetry is the icon-stasis on which a desire for aesthetic ecstasy illustrates itself endlessly.

Diet and Exercise” → “Eat and Train” Coach Sommer dislikes the fitness fixation on “diet and exercise.” He finds it much more productive to focus on “eat and train.” One is aesthetic, and the other is functional. The former may not have a clear goal, the latter always does.