Update 5 - What is Beauty Anyway?

Some Thoughts

My reading has certainly stirred up some thoughts, but they haven't really settled back down. Aristotle has exciting little tidbits on the subject of beauty which, actually, make me wonder whether we're talking about the same thing.

Art: Why make it?

So we’re coming back around. Two thousand and some words later, we’re back to the really pivotal question that will help us answer the question we started with.

Why make art (in our new, limited sense)?

I hadn’t realized until now what a delightful sort of trap I’d lead myself into by taking this road in the past several articles.

Man

Art: What is it? (part 2)

(This is part 2. Read part 1 first!)

The first way I thought of distinguishing between the art that includes spatulas and the art that includes The Odyssey was to say that the first has to do with needs and the second does not. But then King Lear said to me “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous.” by which I understand him to be saying that, if we reduce our considerations to “needs”, we might find we slip down a pretty steep slope and end up with little or nothing left.

The Good, The True, and the Beautiful

This post is a follow-up to Consumerism. Click here to read that article first.

A thing of beauty, teaching the truth?

So, in the last article, I outlined a philosophical underpinning of consumerism. Because the producer produces to get money, the consumers’ tastes (as indicated by coughing up the dough) are treated as practically an end in themselves. Neither the producer nor the consumer is required or expected to look behind these. This need not be a conscious position taken by people involved in pop-culture, because it is