In the movie 300, King Leonidas makes an offhand remark that has generated some controversy. He refers to the Athenians contemptuously as “boy-lovers,” imputing effeminate homosexuality among the Athenians in sharp contrast to the soldierly masculinity of the Spartans. It’s a harsh put-down, one that certainly matches the tone of the film, but has the unfortunate disadvantage of being completely false. It can be fun to watch 300 and pick out the various classical references scattered throughout. For instance, the Spartans’ military application of the double-reeded flute shown while Leonidas and his band are marching to Thermopylae is attested by […]

It’s time to revisit gentrification here at Social Matter. The odd part of this phenomenon is that many of the people who are most aggressive in re-settling old, run-down cities destroyed by misguided policies are also usually some of the most ardent fanatics for Civil Rights. Part of the reason for this is that everyone who goes through any kind of modern schooling in the US learns to venerate Civil Rights activists from the 20th century more fervently than any other figures. American schoolchildren probably need to write more essays about Martin Luther King than they do about people like […]

When I was a kid, my dad used to take my sister and me to the Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey circus every year when its tour schedule brought it to Madison Square Garden. One year (I was maybe 12 or 13, so this would have made it the mid-1980s) the television commercials for the circus advertised that this time, they’d have a genuine, real-life unicorn there. They even showed it in the commercial – this white animal with a long straight horn right in the middle of its head that was riding around on what looked like a parade float, […]

“Always think of what is useful and not what is beautiful. Beauty will come of its own accord.” -Nikolai Gogol A consideration of beauty always starts with the concept of ‘prettying things up’, which is another word for adornment – something we have come to regard as useless. What does Gogol mean other than utilitarianism? Or is utilitarianism merely a misinterpretation of a real phenomenon: the natural emergence of the Beautiful? I have a pet theory about the domain of the Beautiful, and that while truisms spoken about it are true, they are in many cases trivially so. If we say beauty is useless, do mean that […]

Liberals have some sort of weird fascination with Banksy, the pseudonymous English graffiti “artist.” I suppose the fact that he’s such a shadowy figure is part of it. He’s got a certain mystique. And I suppose the fact that he’s at least nominally socially transgressive warms the cockles of their hearts as well. There’s nothing contemporary liberals love more than pretending that it’s still the sixties (whether they were alive in the sixties or not) and that they’re still blowing minds and shocking the bourgeoisie establishment and standing up to The Man. (This is another facet of that self-deluding psychodrama […]

Nowhere in the culture is this inversion of values more apparent than in the spreading cultural antipathy towards aesthetics and ideals of virtue and beauty. Beauty is perfection.  Beauty represents goodness and transcendence.  Beauty elevates the human race.  Beauty is inspiration and pleasure.  Humans are evolutionarily programmed to recognize, appreciate, and seek out beauty, and to create works of incredible beauty in music, literature, and visual arts. Above all, beauty is truth.  Preferences exist, but true beauty is undeniable.  One might prefer the clanging of pots and pans, but no one can deny the beautiful mastery of Albinoni’s Adagio in […]

It is commonly said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet, in the real world, there seems to be a fair amount of congruity about what people consider beautiful, with most arguments about particular instances being about degree, not direction. Furthermore, when people are asked about what they find beautiful, there is a fair amount of cross cultural congruity on the matter.  Which raises an important question: Is there a biological basis for it? In a famous “cultural experiment” two artists, Komar and Melamid commissioned a market survey in several different countries to determine what people actually […]

Most American cities have no real planning behind them. There are urban planners. There are regulations that tell people what they can and can’t build, when they can build, and how high they can build it. There are zoning commissions telling people where they can build what kind of building and run what kind of business in what place. There are laws telling you where you can put windows, how many doors you can have, whether or not you can use stairs, and so on and so forth. There are countless electoral bodies that can say ‘no,’ and consultants need […]

One of the few items that truly separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, revealing the human spirit and soul, is art. In our 21st century cultural landscape, art is a degraded idea, made ugly by an intellectual crowd too happy to just be considered cool. Art is far too open to any amateur. The multicultural crowd slides into forms, where audiences are told that the alien-looking is on par with Rembrandt. We live in a society where simple representations of beach babe beauty creates online firestorms and real life bomb threats from feminists. How do you fight […]