Category: Beauty/Aesthetics
Is Beauty Objective?
If you are like most people alive today, you believe ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ This is exactly what I was taught and grew up believing — but no one ever told me that (in view of...
The Body of Music
Music has a body. Or, as Jeremy Begbie argues in the latest Books and Culture, the expression of music is inseparable from corporeality. Music making and music hearing are ways we engage the physical world. Even in the case of...
Selling Classical Music
Is classical music dying? While it may depend upon what we mean by “classical”,there has been concern among the cultural elite that the symphony no longer holds its position of cultural importance. Case in point: while the LA Philharmonic opened...
500 Years of Women in Art — in 3 Minutes
A lovely video slide-show has shown up on YouTube which runs through 500 years worth of paintings depicting feminine beauty. The viewing experience is quite mesmerizing, as the video’s creator melds each successive face with a fluid ease. (The classical...
the thorns of a rose – a myth
A fascinating narrative in the style of the Greek fables, written by unlikely author… “In ancient times, when the world was just beginning that is, there was a young lonely nymph named Rose. Rose was lonely because she wasn’t...
Pensées
Have you ever read Pascal’s “Pensées“? (French for “Thoughts”) It is a delightful, interesting, and often challenging panoply of little thoughts, aphorisms, maxims, questions, plus the occasional more lengthy argument (It is from this collection, for instance, that we get...
Hitler as Aesthetic
Check out the interesting book review brought to us by Books and Culture. The book reviewed is a Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics in which Frederic Spotts argues that the “will to power” and aesthetic sensibility of Hitler are...