What is Art? and/or What is Beauty?

[Philosophy Now]

The following answers to this artful question each win a random book.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Wh ... _is_Beauty

[Dubious]

That which requires a higher sensibility to acknowledge which I find especially true when Art is NOT aligned to beauty but forces a transcendence beyond that limitation...something seldom acknowledged or appreciated.

[Melchior]

Art is Cliff:

https://youtu.be/botdmsQilnU

[SiobhanL]

Art is a resistance to things as they are. Beauty is the absence of character.

[Dalek Prime]

I know it when I see/hear it. I wont be told what it is.

[Dubious]

I know it when I see/hear it. I wont be told what it is.

That's how most people see it which makes the question somewhat superfluous. There is no other counterpoint to it except individual preference and what we denote as art is merely craft however pleasing or not. It's only a philosophy question which keeps on being asked because that's philosophy's job.

[Dalek Prime]

Sometimes, IMHO, philosophy's job is like masturbation with no release, and I'm unenthusiastic for it. Bertrand Russell cautioned against believing that philosophy could truly break new ground, and accepted its limitations, as I also do.

[Dubious]

Sometimes, IMHO, philosophy's job is like masturbation with no release, and I'm unenthusiastic for it. Bertrand Russell cautioned against believing that philosophy could truly break new ground, and accepted its limitations, as I also do.

Russell was one bright cookie, no question. It showed a lot of foresight on his part to accept its limitations. He had much opportunity to experience that lessening during his long life because now, after nearly 50 years after his death, it barely has any function left. What was only half full not too long ago is now empty with no refill in sight. I've grown accustomed to reading him more for his style than for his insights. It feels somehow regenerating which, I suppose, is a symptom of art.

[Pluto]

Art is a practice which mostly explores vision and its effects upon the person and society. Beauty is that which is pleasing to the senses and also to the mind. In a cruel world beauty is the glitch, the expression, of the immense potentiality for good. Art and Beauty are good, not bad. In an amoral society and world, art and beauty house an ethical dimension.

[marjoram_blues]

Big Art is Majestic Work.
Little art is a skill.
Big Beauty is Wondrous Delight.
Little beauty is a wolf whistle.

[Pluto]

Art is a metaphysical tool with which to create simulations of beauty

[anonymous001]

There is no such thing as beauty as beauty is but a mere illusion of the mind. As the normal human is an illusion from the media as there exists no living standards code for every human to live by as every individual human makes there own living and lifestyle choices.

[marjoram_blues]

Found this thread when searching for 'culture' - seems I've been here before...but everything changes; outlooks and patience to read what others have to say. I scrolled down through the winning letters...finally coming to rest on David Howard...he wrote:
'...If we are wise, we will look and listen with an open spirit; sometimes with a wry smile; always celebrating the diversity of human imaginings and achievement'.

If we are wise...
We can accept that there exists a sense of wonder for all...sometimes it just hasn't been tapped in to - or 'cultured'.

What does 'human culture' mean to you ? Is it about Art, or the art of connecting life and thought?

Am I cultured if I travel to London to visit the Hokusai 'Beyond the Great Wave' exhibition at the British Museum, London.
What would I gain that I couldn't get from exploring on-line? What would I lose?

Of course, I am using 'culture' here as an appreciation of good literature/music, art and food.
What if we see it as simply, as in the biological sense - humans as colony of micro-organisms growing in a petri dish ?
So, what is the 'food of life'? Art. Beauty. All mental.

But what of culture in terms of a tool for survival - we like to divide and classify, sometimes this is helpful, other times not so much.
Is that what art is all about - a small part of human behaviour - which can bring people together.

Should philosophy be saying 'Let's get Cultured and Save the World' ?
Hmmm, not catchy enough...

Is it wise to dismiss 'human culture' as froth and bubbles ?
I would bet that hardly anyone cares enough about 'Art and Beauty' to even click on an aesthetics thread...it's all about quick links to music and rabbiting on about likes/dislikes. But yet, even here, we can learn - and even begin to appreciate other forms and content of wonder.

[Nick_A]

Does beauty inspire you more to dissect a beautiful object into fragments in the spirit of scientific investigation or to contemplate what it masks? Consider these two quotes. Which is more meaningful for you? There is no right and wrong in this. It is just a basic comparison of perspectives.


"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" ~ Richard P. Feynman

"Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very aptly, it is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers its own existence. We do not desire something else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not know in the least what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back to our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing. We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at." ~ Simone Weil

[Belinda]

Nick_A posted:

It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at." ~ Simone Weil

The above is true and perhaps can said in another way: love doesn't want to own or control beauty but wants rather to serve beauty and live in the company of beauty.