Do you distinguish between a response to the aesthetic andfor beauty, for the human made or the natural, some say, found art. I ask this because your text has the ' aesthetic experience' as a defining characteristic, even a predicate, of what is aesthetic. Clive Bell, a fundamentalist formalist, believes in a distinctive aesthetic experience of form, as would many aestheticians. .
--- On Tue, 4/12/11, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: From: William Conger <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 5:06 AM By ethics /aesthetics do you mean anything to do with behavior? Can the aesthetic experience -- or a work of beauty -- inspire the beholder to act ethically, that is, to be virtuous? I would say, without going too deeply into the issue, that the work itself can't be aesthetic or have any meaning. It's just stuff or some objectified subject. If an encounter with it seems to evoke an aesthetic experience and even leads to a virtuous act or state of mind, then those responses are created by the beholder and projected to the thing. The problem is threefold: 1. Nothing material can have intrinsic metaphysical attributes like moral goodness, aesthetic quality, or ethical value. 2. Those are conditions projected by humans. 3. Those conditions are never stable but always dependent on contexts (codes, rules, habits, local and universal) changing in time. Thus since there's no fixed definition of the aesthetic so there is no fixed notion of the ethical. The two terms don't necessarily correspond to each other. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Ian Stuart <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, April 11, 2011 10:26:27 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? this casts a net on a serious issue: is aesthetics, for, against or neutral with regard to ethics? Ian --- On Tue, 4/12/11, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: From: William Conger <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, April 12, 2011, 4:22 AM What are you talking about? Do you mean the photo is out of focus or do you mean there's no subject or do you mean there's no complexity of fracture in the composition, meaning that it's an 'all-over' composition. You need to be more specific. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected]:///Users/w-conger/Desktop/Scanned%20Image.ti ff Sent: Mon, April 11, 2011 7:49:40 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic photo? A reason I like it is because it does not have a focal point. It doesn't, right? On 1/28/11, William Conger <[email protected]> wrote: > What's aesthetic to you? The big net that enables people to grow crops of > fish > in filthy, crammed surroundings, just to maximize their numbers and make it > easier to harvest them; to contradict nature? Or is it the blue cast, that > dreamy soft color. Or is it the combination of the image of capture, > protection, nurturing as a metaphor of infant nurturing at mama's breast? > Or is > it the geometry of the net itself, repetitive, unitary, an underwater > geodesic > structure --proven to be the most durable type of structure against outside > pressures, winds, above water, currents below, all massaging the the human > thirst for power over nature, the elimination of the sublime, the conquest > of > the unknowable by the forces of reason? Or does the scene remind you of > some > personal experience you cherish? Does it make you want to hold your breath > as > if to heighten the memory of underwater swimming as a kid? You can't get by > with > simply declaring an aesthetic experience and expect others to get it. You > gotta > do more, Mr. Berg. So much more. > > It's one thing to experience the sudden, involuntary, aesthetic sensation; > it's > another thing altogether to sustain it in contemplation or recollection. > For > that we need words, images and metaphor. But none of that matters to you. > You > like to ask leading questions, the sort of questions that reveal your > unreasoned > answers. Tragic banality and intellectual fakery. Worse, even: Like the > burlesque queen who swished and twirled but never dropped that last veil. > wc > > > ----- Original Message ---- > From: joseph berg <[email protected]> > To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> > Sent: Thu, January 27, 2011 10:32:57 PM > Subject: Aesthetic photo? > > Am I the only one who finds this photo of an underwater fish farm > mesmerizingly aesthetic?: > > http://www.staradvertiser.com/multimedia/photo_galleries/viewer?galID=1076445 23
