Comments on: Closing Aesthetics Week: Beauty in Function, Function in Beauty

By: jay

jay — Wed, 20 May 2015 12:13:35 +0000

Fractals patterns are the basis of all beauty:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672318/a-design-revolution-that-could-lift-humanity

By: Valkea

Valkea — Sun, 10 May 2015 22:47:34 +0000

Off-topic, because there was not suitable article to post this, but it is useful for you to know. It can be applied to a wide range of politics as long as the appropriate variables are changed; it could be applied to, among other things, politics which causes white flight and to many other kinds of purposefully destructive politics. Curley-effect:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/curley_effect_1.pdf

By: IA

IA — Sun, 10 May 2015 18:10:40 +0000

Oddly enough, I’ve come to the conclusion that form is more important than content. It’s really hard though to devise good design, texture, color, etc., AND tell a story. Probably why there are more bad than good images, or as you say abstraction is self-limiting.

I’d like to add that the story should contain mystery, rather than needing words to do so.

By: E. Antony Gray (@RiverC)

E. Antony Gray (@RiverC) — Sat, 09 May 2015 18:00:08 +0000

They were right but not right enough; they always missed some uses, often on purpose, as a way to rationalize error or excess. There are always people who were honest and forthright, but things optimized for a particular response may outperform those lazily made for a multitude. Illustration is a purpose in its own right, and those who reject that reject their own souls, which are the image of God. Storytelling is the most anti-fragile form of information distribution — the trend has been to label enemy stories as ‘myths’ or ‘legends’ or just stories in the negative sense, while friendly stories are science, truth, fact, self-evidence, etc. There is a difference between facts, legends, stories, science, etc, but the common distinction is erroneous because it is primarily political: it is primarily a tool to support one group of people over the other, but in this case it does so dishonestly by warping the lexicon.

In general, abstract art’s problem is that it reduces the uses of a work, and thereby makes it much harder for it to be beautiful. Initially this was good (take Monet) and forced the artist to work harder to make their work do its thing. But later, when anti-art came around (probably starting with Dada) results which were beautiful were rejected and techniques were created to AVOID beautiful results.

If beauty is the soul of art, art is to modern art as mankind is to abortions. The body is delivered without the soul.

By: IA

IA — Sat, 09 May 2015 13:49:44 +0000

Nice article. The idea of beauty as a by-product of an object being useful I think is very true. A self-consious attempt to make something beautiful would be design. But we seem to want more than that.

If you read the actual statements of the early Moderns, i.e., early 20th century, they justify their attempts at revolt to tradition by saying that it (traditional Western art) was mere illustration and by introducing subconscious intuition they are discovering deeper truths. This destroyed storytelling. However, couldn’t storytelling be useful? And therefore the art required to tell a story be the by-product.