Madeline L’Engle on beauty, mystery 12 July 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Beauty, Christianity.1 comment so far
From Rebecca Horton’s Passionately Alive blog, a Madeline L’Engle quote on beauty and mystery for this Sunday morning:
I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.
In the midst of what we are going through this summer I have to hold onto this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable. Could we be fascinated by a Maker who was completely explained and understood? The mystery is tremendous, and the fascination that keeps me returning to the questions affirms that they are worth asking, and that any God worth believing in is the God not only of the immensities of the galaxies I rejoice in at night when I walk the dogs, but also the God of love who cares about the sufferings of us human beings and is here, with us, for us, in our pain and in our joy.
From her book Two-part invention.
LinkLuv: On beauty and art 30 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Abstract art, Beauty, Modern culture.4 comments
I’m pretty caught up in the logistics of moving/selling the house and don’t have much time to be blogging right now, but a few things in an article titled Beauty and Desecration: We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness seemed to be worth excerpting.
At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form.
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes.
In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.
This last quote is interesting to me mainly on account of many previous bloggy discussions with friend and artist Timothy Jones, who finds abstract (or, more specifically, non-objective or non-representational) art to be decorative. Read the article in it’s entirety via this link.
I haven’t finished the article, but printed it off in hopes of doing so later this week.
Models as muse to a generation? 25 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty, Feminine aesthetics.add a comment
The current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the supposed ideal of the feminine physique from 1947-1997. Molly Young reviews the show for More Intelligent Life. The follow paragraphs caught my attention in particular:
The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, an exhibition organized by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and sponsored by Marc Jacobs), features photographs and works of haute couture dating from 1947 to 1997. The aim is to demonstrate the way “a truly stellar model can sum up the attitude of her time–becoming not only a muse to designers or photographers, but a muse to a generation,” explains Harold Koda, the institute’s head curator.
As the curatorial notes put it, models are those “whose elegant poses and gestures” evoke the attitudes of the day. The show makes clear that this is partly something a model can control and partly something she is simply, ineffably, born with. In a sense, all top models are naturals.
Are such models (the article goes on to note how models in the 80s and 90s essentially became their own brands) actually muses to entire generations? Or even most of a generation?
That claim is a bit hard for me to stomach, although — like I’ve said already on the blog — I’ve never been attracted to any of the models which supposedly represent the attitudes of my lifetime. Is this just a difference in personal aesthetic, or is the claim that a “top model” represents a generation just a stretch?
Image from Wikipedia.
What Men Want: Barbie doll or fertile goddess? 15 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Beauty, Feminine aesthetics, Modern culture.5 comments
Here’s a very interesting article, So do men REALLY prefer miss average, from the Daily Mail about a study of college males in Australia who are apparently more attracted to an average female figure than a stick-thin supermodel. “According to this week’s New Scientist, 100 men taking part in an Australian study were asked to rate the attractiveness of 200 drawings of female torsos of different sizes.” The results suggest a [British] size 14 — “5ft 4in tall, a size 14 with a waist that hovers around 30in, rounded hips and a 36DD bust” — is the most desirable.
The article also includes commentary from an assenting woman and dissenting man. From Anne Shooter: “The only people ever to have made unpleasant comments about my size are other women . . . Thin women are skinny for other women – not for men.” Tom Sykes counters by suggesting that while men might want to settle down with the average woman, the girls they fantasize about look more like Pamela Anderson.
It’s a good read. I won’t elaborate, except to reiterate what I’ve said in previous posts on the topic by saying that 1) “healthy” is the best figure and 2) I’ve never been attracted to supermodels.
Image from Post Secret.
Adding: Another post on beauty and the female form recently past 5,000 views, the most of any among The Aesthetic Elevator’s repertoire: Beauty: Female aesthetics through the years
Shoeboxes, spec homes creating ignorant Americans??? 11 June 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Affluenza, Architecture, Entitlement, Living incarnationally, Modern culture.6 comments
The wife and I talked last night about real estate, newer homes versus older homes, realtors and so forth. And it got me wondering:
Has the glut of poorly designed spec homes thrown up in the U.S. from, roughly, 1960 on created a cultural deficit in that Americans look for the wrong things when choosing a place to live?
Since we’ve started looking for houses, actually since our friends began buying [mortgages for] houses five-plus years back, it’s been interesting to observe their choices and listen to their reasoning for said choices. There are some who, like my wife and I, crave the character (details), craftsmanship and environs found in many older homes in established parts of a city, but many people seem to be exclusively interested in newer homes.
From what I’ve been able to deduce, this usually stems from a desire for a maintenance free home (which, by the way, does not exist). Buyers want newer appliances and utilities and roofs. What they often fail to realize is that you’ll end up in the same boat as if you’d bought an older place that’s been cared for after just a few years. Appliances and utilities aren’t built as well as they used to be and, unless you plan on living in a house for only five years (give or take) you will probably end up needing to repair and/or replace the heating element in an oven, install a new water heater or buy a new air conditioner. I finally replaced the shiny stainless steel fan/light/heater in our bathroom last year which was likely original to our 1955 bungalow; the new one will probably die in less than ten years and is hideous in comparison to its predecessor.
Some men don’t want anything to do with painting the outside of a house as the sun and snow take their tole on soffits and siding . . . which reminds me that I need to post this picture,
a stunning example of why vinyl siding is not really better than wood. This was on the garage of one of the houses we looked at in Nebraska. It was shaded, as I recall, and on the East side of a house — not exposed to hot afternoon sun. I’ve also seen the stuff pop, warp, fade and crack and it’s just beyond me why it gets used so much. Painting every ten or fifteen years (assuming you use good paint, not the Walmart brand) is a lot easier than replacing siding every twenty-five years in my opinion. Further, slapping vinyl over existing finishes seems likely to encourage mold.
Does cultural wealth factor into this equation, where newer homes in the suburbs are representative of a certain affluence that some older neighborhoods don’t allow an owner to brag about? Perhaps young mothers are under the impression that the ‘burbs are safer for the kiddos. Maybe the entitlement some of us feel after growing up surrounded by such an affluent culture leads us to believe we deserve shiny new houses.
Regardless, I have to wonder if the suburban architecture perpetuated over the past five plus decades has resulted in a more ignorant culture. Is it possible that we don’t know what good design looks like anymore? We don’t realize what wasted space or good traffic flow is? And that we’re (somewhat intentionally) losing the ability to care for our own property under the guise of the “maintenance free?”
Older homes, by contrast, often excel in design and craftsmanship over new ones. Lumber used to build them was straighter and drier, and sometimes above and beyond what was required for the job. The 830 square foot house I was drawn to on our recent house-hunting trip employed 2 x 10s for floor joists. No wonder the place was so marvelously square after 75 years! Less space is wasted in homes of that age, generally, and built-in storage was more abundant. Sure, closets might be smaller, but are walk-in closets really all that great? Luxurious, yes, but they also encourage clutter in our consumerist culture.
Seasoned homes are normally, subjective as this may seem, more pleasing to the eye. It doesn’t take an inordinate number of complexities to make a house or community pleasing to the eye. Apparently a book titled A Pattern Language talks about how a house can be successful yet appear to be a fairly simple design (from the outside). I’ve been told many times by different people I need to read this book. It is on my Amazon wish list!
None of this is meant to imply that we should cease new home construction. Obviously, as populations increase and older homes that were not cared for (or weren’t built so well, or that highways or big-box stores are paving over etc etc) are torn down new dwellings will need to replace them. Why, though, should new homes perpetuate a bland, cheap, and unenduring suburban aesthetic? They shouldn’t, and they don’t have to. A friend of mine here in Siloam Springs hopes to found a residential construction company that will bring back the details and craftsmanship of the early 20th century. He started with his own home which includes such details as a breakfast nook and drawers built into the risers of the staircase.
Will my friend find enough of us who appreciate the details in a craftsman home to float his business? Americans seem to be dangerously content with lousy dwelling design. We’ve become afflicted as a culture with the Texas Syndrome, where as long as something is big or impressive it’s credible (Yes, I know that link isn’t precisely backing up my assertion, but it’s related and a good article.). We’d rather have a poorly designed 2,500 square foot house than a thought-through 1,200 square foot bungalow that functions just as well as it’s bigger brother. Shoeboxes with holes cut out for doors and windows litter new subdivisions and we eat them up. McMansions (and their smaller cousins in more modest subdivisions) flaunt ludicrously steep and wasteful rooflines, which wouldn’t be all that wasteful if the attic was actually used as living space. But it’s generally not.
My concern is that suburban design of the past fifty years has infiltrated our psyche, and that our aesthetic expectations have subsequently been wounded without our being aware of it. Some of this sentiment, thankfully, might be changing as Downtown, U.S.A., is revivified and younger generations move back into the heart of cities. But from where I sit, we have a long ways to go in many parts of the country, and a lot of people in the younger generations still aspire to a questionable suburban aesthetic.
Thoughts?
(As always, there are exceptions to the generalizations I’ve made in this post. Keep that in mind when commenting.)
Potter Eva Zeisel on TED: The playful search for beauty 21 April 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Art, Beauty, Ceramics, Craft.add a comment
Ninety-four year old potter Eva Zeisel talks about her life and work in the following TED talk titled The Playful Search for Beauty. This is so worth watching. Just to whet your appetite (it’s an 18 minute video), this quote:
Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.
Aesthetics and gender 26 March 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Beauty.add a comment
Last night The Curator linked to a Wired blurb (hardly long enough to be an article) titled Beauty affects men’s and women’s brains differently. The title had me hooked, but the spot didn’t deliver. Some excerpts (that I’ve rearranged to make more sense):
“This the first study about neural activation in aesthetic tasks to include sex as a variable,” said study co-author Camilo Cela-Conde, an evolutionary anthropologist at Spain’s Universitat de les Illes Balears.
Earlier studies on sex-based cognitive differences have found that men seem to have a heightened sense of absolute location. Women, by contrast, are quicker to process relative values.
In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under. The difference could be the result of evolutionary pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
I’m ignoring the somewhat inane plugs for evolution embedded in the blurb; the research, after all was conducted by an “evolutionary anthropoligist.” Wired notes that the study was conducted with a pretty small group of people, which makes me wonder why they bothered to mention it at all.
Further, this isn’t news. Both my wife and I — and probably any other conscious person — could have told you based on simple unscientific observations that men think more concretely and women more abstractly.
I hope this research wasn’t publicly funded.
Photo from MarkHillary’s Flickr Photostream.
The mathematics of beauty 23 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Art, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Design, Furniture.3 comments
Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe penned a very interesting profile this weekend on one Horace Brock, an imposing man with five degrees under his belt including classical music, mathematics and economics.
Brock claims to have discovered a formula for beauty. From the article:
What about this theory, then?
In truth, it’s satisfyingly simple. Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into “themes” and “transformations.” A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked . . .
Brock wants to be clear that his theory applies only to beauty in design – in other words, architecture, furniture, and other kinds of decorative art: “That’s very important – I wouldn’t want to claim too much.” But in his catalog essay he claims his account “makes it possible to clarify, and indeed to quantify, one of the deepest principles of aesthetics: People . . . tend to be bored if there is too much simplicity (the kitchen chair, certain Gregorian chants) and overwhelmed if there is too much complexity (pastiche Victorian furniture, much 20th-century classical music).”
In his estimation, the theory also subsumes most previous theories of beauty in design – from Pythagoras’s golden rectangle to Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” from the celebrated golden section to the Fibonacci series – into a neat mathematical equation.
Smee probes a little and questions whether beauty can be reduced so simplistically to an equation. Brock is absolute in his response to the idea that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, “It’s absolute crap.”
A man after my own heart. Read the article in its entirety here.
How a bad economy influences art & design 19 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Affluenza, Beauty, Business of art, Design, Fiber, Handmade, Modern culture.3 comments
In this case, design refers specifically to fashion, though I’m thinking in broader terms. NPR’s Ari Shapiro interviewed Sally Singer, Vogue magazine’s fashion news and features director in a Morning Edition spot this morning.
I have a love-hate relationship with fashion — both practical fashion and runway fashion. Runway fashion is easy for the masses to deride. A lot of it appears to lack almost every practical consideration, and us rabble in the middle classes can’t remotely afford it. It rightly births satire such as Ugly Betty. However, artistically and aesthetically fashion design is worthwhile.
“In tough times, why not express yourself by how you dress — whether you’re doing it from what’s in your closet, what’s in a vintage store [or] what you made yourself?” Singer asks. What a person chooses to wear — or live in, drive in, read or listen to if we expand the discussion — communicates, whether we like it or not. Our wardrobe can say that we value our appearance, or that we don’t. It often identifies us with a certain subculture. For better or worse, it sets us apart as lower, middle or upper class.
from the fashion industry reflecting depression era chic.
And, perhaps, fashion serves as an indicator of an economy. Singer talks a little about “depression era chic” in the interview. A New York Post article elaborates on this idea:
The duds say it all — and it’s depressing.
Taking a cue from the grim economy, this fall’s fashions at Banana Republic, Gap and H&M are featuring a distinctly Depression-era trend of cloche hats, pencil skirts, conductor caps and baggy, vintage-style dresses.
I wouldn’t have expected this kind of a trend from the fashion industry (had I been thinking about it). In other artistic segments, possibly: Painting has historically reflected social hardships; film and photography possess similar track records as I recall. While any observant twenty year old is old enough to realize that styles recur, this years’ shift in clothing design is more intentional than what generally appears to be a more simple ebb and flow to this common observer.
That said, props to the fashion industry for taking a culturally relevant direction. I’m not sure, off-hand, if it’s the right direction; one might worry that mimicking the styles of the depression might result in even more dire attitudes. The flip-side — to create elaborate clothing that defies a cultural climate — could instead instill hope.
Then again, it might also create some kind of complex in us, causing us to believe things are better than they are whereby we spend more than we actually have to spend. This is what Singer seems to refer to as morality. Towards the end of the interview, she states that “Not shopping is not a moral act right now.”
There’s actually no indication of whether she expects us to actually spend more than we have, but in the context of American consumerism the inference is believable. And such reckless spending is more-or-less what landed us in this so-called economic mess in the first place.
Photo from the Retro Radar.
Alarm clock aesthetics 12 February 2009
Posted by pcNielsen in Aesthetics, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Design, Modern culture.4 comments
I never thought it would be so difficult to find a well-designed — functionally and aesthetically — alarm clock. The two in our home now are both quite old, and some of their more basic functions recently ceased to operate. Thus we’ve been thinking about purchasing a new model for some months now.
I checked Walmart to no avail before heading over to Amazon.com. They have a large variety of items with competitive prices and a large number of user reviews. I was stunned at the hideous objects that resulted from my search. Apparently alarm clocks haven’t been redesigned in thirty years.
Of course, there are a few space-age exceptions, as well as your more expensive iPod ready fair with decent minimalist aspirations, in line with Apple products. However, I’m not so much into the coldness of the space-age aesthetic, and both of these options cost more than I wanted to pay for a simple alarm clock.
We ended up with the little clock above. It possesses all of the functionality we wanted, which was basically two alarms, a radio and the ability to set times both forward and backward. But you can’t read the time from halfway across the room. The time is backlit, and neither my wife or I can make out the digits from the bed to the dresser. Further, it’s quite bright and potentially interferes with sleep.
Oh, and the wife doesn’t like the looks of it either. I still contend it’s the best from among the options I found, but she’s correct when observing that the design is more or less blah, and that the white color pops whereas black would recede.
This is problematic. The little thing just won’t work for us, but I dread starting the seemingly futile search over again. I don’t need gimmicks, which there are an abundance of. I just want something that looks good and functions.
Perhaps we need to bring back certain principles espoused by the Bauhaus, where aesthetics were at least some part of industrial design.
