Aesthetics Art

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 this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Bence Nanay introduces the field of aesthetics, considering both Western and non-Western aesthetic traditions and exploring why it is sometimes misunderstood or considered to be too elitist - by artists, musicians, and even philosophers. As Nanay shows, so-called "high art" has no more claims on aesthetics than sitcoms, tattoos, or punk rock.

Are art and science separated by an unbridgeable divide? Can they find common ground? In this book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning. Kandel illustrates how reductionism - the distillation of larger scientific or aesthetic concepts into smaller, more tractable components - has been used by scientists and artists alike to pursue their respective truths.

Longtime leader in the luxury goods sector and former Chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton North America reinvents the art and science of brand-building under the rubric of Aesthetic Intelligence. In a world in which people have cheap and easy access to most goods and services, yet...

Featuring an enlightening introduction by the book's translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, providing generational and cultural context for Kandinsky and his work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art gives testimony to the mind and creative expression of Kandinsky and other artists of his generation. This seminal and thought-provoking book exploring the heart of the artistic endeavor belongs in the library of every serious artist and student of modern art.

Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What Is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire, and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good; for the improvement of humankind.

Arthur Schopenhauer's The Art of Literature is a lively, illuminating and brutally honest collection of essays on literary style and values, writers and critics, and the nature of genius. Schopenhauer advises seclusion and independent thought, criticizes Pliny's reading habits, and explains the pitfalls of certain schools of thought and even virtues like modesty. His thought-provoking arguments, caustic wit, and accessible style make this a must for any aspiring writer.

Fiction is an Art in every way, worthy to be called the sister and the equal of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture, Music, and Poetry; that is to say, her field is as boundless, her possibilities as vast, her excellences as worthy of admiration, as may be claimed for any of her sister Arts.

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.

The Principles of Aesthetics can be considered the definitive work on aesthetics, the philosophy of art, beauty, and taste. It is the result of a series of lectures given by Dewitt H. Parker, and gives a comprehensive review of a truly extensive subject. Every person has some sense of the beautiful and the ugly. We all admire certain images, combinations of sound, taste, smell, or feeling. But where does this enjoyment come from?

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing.

Art is a distinct entity. It has its own characteristic, its own function, its own role to play in society. It must be afforded the status and identity it rightly deserves in a world that is becoming ever more needful of its existence. “Art”, however, has increasingly become a catch-all term. Intended primarily for artists of all colours and flavours, as well as art appreciators, this audiobook aims to free up the thinking of the artist – or indeed anyone – by opening their eyes to many unexamined assumptions, and thereby questioning the validity of strongly-held views.

Art is the creative manifestation of essences. In order to understand the relation between art and reality, we need a philosophical guide. The best way to comprehend how the creative act of imagining enables the mind to seek reality is to employ the kind of dialectical thinking that Plato used in his dialogues. Beginning with the shadows on the wall of the cave in which each person dwells, that process gradually enables us to grasp the essences that are manifested in individual works of art.