Showing titles in Aesthetics

Az ember a természetnek vagy apja, vagy megrablója. Ezt az ősi iráni tudást Darwin nem ismerte. A létért folytatott mészárlás tanában azonban nem jelenik meg egyetlen Mozart-akkord, Giotto tájkép, vagy Pascal-aforizma sem. A világ újkori kirablásával szemben a vallás, a tudomány, a filozófia készületlenül állt. Egyedül a mûvészet tudta megôrizni a humánum "alapállását". Művésznek lenni azt jelenti: túlemelkedni a téridőbe szorított életen. A művészet egyetemes távlatot nyit, és a létünket átható homályba bevilágít.

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley. Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone...

Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren’t there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread—sometimes it’s tied into a noose—that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism.

Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.

The art described in book is presented as the highest form of human resistance—not merely political or social, but existential. It is not just a reaction to power, injustice, or the suffocating grip of convention; it is a way of transcending them altogether. In its most authentic form, art carves out a territory that lies beyond the reach of censors, beyond the dictates of circumstance, beyond the reach of those who believe control is the same as order.

Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us?

No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world.

A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth’s pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom’s flipside: screening. The airport’s heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws...

Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse.

When is the “beautiful game” at its most beautiful? How does football function as a lens through which so many view their daily lives? What’s right in front of fans that they never see? Football celebrates and scrutinizes the world’s most popular sport—from top-tier professionals to children just learning the game. As an American who began playing football in the 1970s as it gained a foothold in the States, Mark Yakich reflects on his own experiences alongside the sport’s social and political implications, its narrative and documentary depictions, and its linguistic idiosyncrasies

Ballot examines the psychological, cultural, and political significance of voting in an increasingly anti-voting climate. Armed with her personal experiences as a poll worker, electoral organizer, and activist, Anjali Enjeti unspools a timely narrative about the precarious state of the ballot during one of the most tumultuous political eras in US history, and recounts the astonishing events leading up to the 2024 presidential election.

Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world’s most conspicuous – and contentious – tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance.

In the hierarchy of foods, snacks are deemed trivial – perhaps even childish – especially in contrast to meals, which are seen as substantial and necessary. The multiple aisles devoted to sweet and savoury treats in supermarkets, and the availability of snacks even at places like home improvement and department stores, speak to the popularity of snacking. But the ubiquity of snacks is relatively new and not common to all countries.

The Wager We Never Won is a meditation on the human obsession with control—our endless attempts to gamble with chaos, to negotiate with fate, to turn risk into meaning. Through lyrical prose and quiet revelation, the book traces the lineage of ambition from the explorers who defied the sea to the modern dreamers who believe progress will save them. It asks whether courage and arrogance have ever truly been different, and whether survival itself might be the most dangerous illusion of all.

Desde o garbo e a elegância nos primeiros anos da República até a atual banalização das cirurgias plásticas, História da beleza no Brasil trata das transformações ligadas aos padrões estéticos e aos cuidados com o corpo, mas também do martírio causado pela feiura e da tumultuada luta para driblar o envelhecimento, a solidão e o fracasso.

La elegancia, en su etimología, está emparentada con la elección (eligĕre), de tal manera que una persona elegante, entre otras cosas, es aquella que sabe elegir. El pensamiento elegante moldea a un sujeto que no lucha por mostrarse distinto entre la multitud sino que se eleva hacia una vida distinguida.

Oscar Wilde wurde am 16.10.1854 in Dublin geboren. Sein Vater war Arzt, seine Mutter Dichterin. Wilde studierte in Dublin und Oxford. Seit 1879 lebte er in London. 1895 wurde er vom Vater seines Freundes Lord Douglas wegen homosexueller Neigungen angezeigt und zu zwei Jahren Zuchthaus verurteilt. Wilde starb am 30.11.1900 verarmt in Paris.

To avoid the hurt from life's failures, we allow in more pain by downsizing our dreams. You know that you can reach that mountain top, yet deny it out of conditioned fear. The only way up is to remove every single layer of faulty programming.

Il tema della bellezza viene qui affrontato da Umberto Galimberti, come nel suo stile, con un ritorno alle sorgenti della nostra cultura. Se quella ebraica era una cultura della parola, quella greca era invece una cultura della visione, dominata dal senso della finitudine e della misura. Così anche la bellezza per l'uomo greco antico è ciò che rispetta delle misure, e cioè ha proporzioni calcolabili. Il cristianesimo porterà poi sulla scena un Dio che si fa corpo visibile, dando in questo modo maggior spazio all'immagine e quindi all'arte figurativa.

La misteriosa natura del bello, a cui faceva riferimento Simone Weil, non è puramente estetica, cioè riconducibile a questioni di gusto. Essa è piuttosto ontologica ed etica, strettamente unita com'è al vero, al giusto e al bene. È questo il senso della bellezza che si ritrova nei testi classici della grecità, da Omero a Saffo ai tragici. Umberto Curi vi si sofferma ampiamente in questo suo saggio, che ha al centro l'analisi del rapporto tra bellezza e tempo.