Showing titles in Aesthetics

'Terrifically lucid and compact . . . an unassumingly intuitive and insightful brief history . . . will tell you more about [Lynch's] life and filmmaking than a thousand academic studies' PETER BRADSHAW, THE SPECTATOR The loss of David Lynch in January 2025 produced an extraordinary outpouring...

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.

Wabi sabi (wah-bi sah-bi) is a captivating concept from Japanese aesthetics, which helps us to see beauty in imperfection, appreciate simplicity and accept the transient nature of all things. With roots in Zen and the way of tea, the timeless wisdom of wabi sabi is more relevant than ever for modern life, as we search for new ways to approach life's challenges and seek meaning beyond materialism.

In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object - either in art, in nature, or the human form - beautiful and examining how we can compare differing judgments of beauty when it is evident all around us that our tastes vary so widely.

In his new book, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley looks to the peculiar mating rituals of birds to better understand the rich origins and ongoing significance of Darwin's sexual selection theory. 'FASCINATING' The Times ‘Matt Ridley is one of our finest science writers … A treat for bird...

Artists have learnt to pay attention. The rest of us spend most of our time on auto-pilot, rushing from place to place, our overfamiliarity blinding us to the marvellous, life-affirming phenomena of our world. But that doesn't have to be the case. In his typical engaging style, Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists - from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world - to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.

In this moving account, Peter Korn explores the nature and rewards of creative practice. We follow his search for meaning as an Ivy-educated child of the middle class who finds employment as a novice carpenter on Nantucket, transitions to self-employment as a designer and maker of fine furniture, takes a turn at teaching and administration at Colorado's Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and then founds a school in Maine: the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, an internationally respected nonprofit institution.

In Praise of Shadows is an eloquent tribute to the austere beauty of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Through architecture, ceramics, theatre, food, women, and even toilets, Tanizaki explains the essence of shadows and darkness, and how they are able to augment beauty. He laments the heavy electric lighting of the West and its introduction to Japan, and shows how the artificial, bright, and polished aesthetic of the West contrasts unfavorably with the moody and natural light of the East.

In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.

"This is a declaration of war. In the name of our creator, we declare a revolutionary war against both the gods and those titans who were gods before them! In the name of our liberator, we declare a revolutionary war against fatalism and every other form of tyranny! We think from out of the end of all things, with an indomitable will to achieve either victory or a martyrdom that inspires enduring rebellion in those to whom we pass the torch of our example."

'WHAT TO READ IN 2025' FINANCIAL TIMES Many artists are unaware of the mathematics that bubble beneath their craft, while some consciously use it for inspiration. Our instincts might tell us that these two subjects are incompatible forces with nothing in common, but what if we’re wrong? Marcus...

A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands “This is a deep exploration of craftsmanship by someone with real, hands-on knowledge. The book is also quirky, surprising, and sometimes quite moving.” —Richard Sennett...

In his extraordinary new book, Alain de Botton explores the importance of buildings in our lives, pondering our attachment to our homes and considering such questions as: Why do people disagree about taste? Can beautiful surroundings make us good?

In this influential sequence of linked interviews, Ranciere explores the interplay of art and politics. The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relationship between art and politics, reclaiming "aesthetics" from the narrow confines it is often reduced to. Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible.

Poststructuralism changes the way we understand the relations between human beings, their culture, and the world. Following a brief account of the historical relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism, this Very Short Introduction traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture.

The Aesthetic Brain takes the listener on a wide-ranging journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Chatterjee uses neuroscience to probe how an aesthetic sense is etched in our minds and evolutionary psychology to explain why aesthetic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses fundamental questions: What is beauty? Is beauty universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art?

In A Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke sets out to define the nature of beauty and sublimity, and establish an objective criterion for discussing aesthetics. His definition of beauty as rooted in pleasure and sexuality, and the sublime in pain and survival, aligned him with the empiricists John Locke and David Hume, as he replaced the metaphysics of Plato's aesthetics with a psychological and physiological perspective.

What part of your beautiful self were you taught to hate? We spend a lot of time trying to improve our 'defects', according to society's ideals of beauty. But these ideals that are often reductive, tyrannical and commercially entangled, imposed upon us by oppressive systems and further strengthened by our conditioned self-loathing. This book encourages unruliness, exploring the ways in which we can rebel against and subvert the current system.

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through color—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, either by making it the property of some foreign body—the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological—or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.

An updated version of the seminal 1994 classic volume on the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Nearly every book with "wabi" or "wabi sabi" in the title is based on the concepts first elucidated in this book. Wabi-sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional....