Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

August 13, 2026
by Aesthetics for Birds
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The Game That Won’t Let You Disappear

Inside of the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, California. [source]

What follows is an essay by Mark Silcox. All italicized passages are taken from Stephen Millhauser’s short story “In the Penny Arcade,” first published in The Hudson Review in 1984.

I passed the little men with boxing gloves standing stiffly in their glass case, but I knew better than to try to stir them into sluggish and inept life. A desolation had fallen over the creatures of the penny arcade. Even the real, live people strolling about noisily about had become infected with the general woodenness; their laughter sounded forced, their gestures seemed exaggerated and unconvincing. I felt caught in an atmosphere of decay and disappointment. I felt that if I could not find what I was looking for, my entire life would be harmed.

When we interact with games as artworks, how much to we expect them to charm, seduce, or absorb us, beyond the ordinary amusements of winning and losing? Is the lure of immersion into unreal worlds a fundamental feature of any and all forms of play? Or might there be distinctive appeal to hovering perpetually on the awkward edge of escape?

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A woman sits at a kitchen table and peels the first potato out of four. She stares at it vacantly. Her outfit is drab, and so is her kitchen which houses an utterly routine assortment of household items.

September 16, 2025
by Aesthetics for Birds
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In Praise of Boring Art

A woman sits at a kitchen table and peels the first potato out of four. She stares at it vacantly. Her outfit is drab, and so is her kitchen which houses an utterly routine assortment of household items.
Scene from Chantal Akerman’s 1975 Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

What follows is an essay by John Gibson and Andreas Elpidorou.

Here’s an improbable claim that turns out to be true: there is plenty of boring art that is also good art, and, in more than a few fascinating instances, this art is good in part because it is boring.

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Ani dancing happily with her eyes closed, surrounded by people in a club-like setting, bathed in vivid blue and magenta lights.

February 27, 2025
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Oscar-Winning Film Anora on the Life-Giving Power of Love and Sex

Ani dancing happily with her eyes closed, surrounded by people in a club-like setting, bathed in vivid blue and magenta lights.

What follows is an essay by Connor K. Kianpour.

We inhabit a cultural moment where sexual libertinism, a hallmark of which is an abundance of transactional sex, is fast becoming the norm. It is sexy to profess that people should feel empowered to have sex for any reason with whoever will have them. Every day, more and more content creators join OnlyFans in an attempt to exchange their sexual bodies for fortunes. Loveless hookups aimed at securing momentary sexual pleasure for all involved parties have become somewhat of a rite of passage in young adulthood. And Sean Baker’s Anora tells a story about sex that challenges the character of our current sexual climate.

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February 20, 2025
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Why Women Should Rethink Their Love of Gay Male Manga

A black and white manga panel where two men embrace in a passionate kiss
Art from Houkago no Etude

What follows is an essay by Helen Wan Wei Luo (Columbia University).

[This essay contains a discussion of sexual assault.]

One popular feminist approach to inclusive media is simple: add more female characters. In Hollywood studios, executive boards seem to shoehorn female characters into storylines on the assumption that the only thing female audiences want is to see women on the big screen. Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit, for instance, adds Tauriel, a female elf who does not appear in the book but is clumsily inserted into the more-or-less Bechdel Test-failing Tolkien universe. But the presumption that audiences inherently want and relate better to fictional worlds that contain people like them should not be accepted without scrutiny. While mainstream media unsatisfyingly evolves from traditional boys’ clubs (e.g., Lord of the Flies) to tokenistic representation verging on femmephobia (e.g., Elizabeth Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean, who must reject her own femininity to prove her worth to a sea of men), one overlooked genre capitalizes on an unintuitive route: creative works made primarily for women and primarily by women, but with no women in them.

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A promotional image from Spotify's 2024 Wrapped. Mostly in Spotify's typeface, some of the letters and numbers are styled as yellow splotches.

December 10, 2024
by Aesthetics for Birds
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How Spotify and its Genres Define Who We Are

A promotional image from Spotify's 2024 Wrapped. Mostly in Spotify's typeface, some of the letters and numbers are styled as yellow splotches.

What follows is an essay by Gabriel Tugendstein.

At the beginning of December, Spotify released its personalized “Wrapped” end-of-year overview to its users. Alongside a list of my most listened-to artists and songs, I was told to pay attention to my “music evolution” from March, when I was in my “Cyberpunk Skateboarding Hip-Hop phase,” to May, which was “Smooth Abstract Conscious Hip-Hop season,” to September, which can only be described as my “Coastal Grandmother Slow Dance Soul moment.”

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September 24, 2024
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What the Photographer Who’s Taken Hundreds of Philosopher Portraits Really Thinks of Philosophers

An older, white man with blue-gray eyes stares directly into the camera. He wears a tweed flat cap, hooded sweatshirt, and herringbone tweed jacket, all in shades of tan, brown, and green. He stands against an aged, wooden tan-brown fence.
Steve Pyke Connemara 2024

Steve Pyke is a renowned portrait photographer. He has published ten books, including the award-winning I Could Read the Sky (with Timothy O’Grady). He has photographed politicians, astronauts, film directors, artists, laborers, and—in two collected volumes—philosophers. He was the staff photographer at The New Yorker for several years and, in 2004, was appointed an MBE. His work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in many permanent collections, including the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A Museum. See more at his website, Pyke-Eye.

Here, he is interviewed by philosopher and Aesthetics for Birds chief editor Alex King.

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A still photo from the show "the Bear." Carmy and Richie stand in the walk in fridge, looking at each other with hostility. Marcus is peeking in the door between them, looking hesitantly at Richie.

July 26, 2024
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What FX’s The Bear Says About the Art of Hospitality

A still photo from the show "the Bear." Carmy and Richie stand in the walk in fridge, looking at each other with hostility. Marcus is peeking in the door between them, looking hesitantly at Richie.

Dedication to craft purifies living. Crafts in the old fashioned sense (ars if we’re being fancy) are human activities requiring a high degree of skill. Often they are institutionalized and highly regimented—think of the workshops of the Old Masters or the scribes of Medieval monasteries. This dedication is partly instrumental. The products of craft often require extreme levels of time, concentration, and effort. This dedication isn’t always—or even often—instrumental for the participants, though. They often take the life of craft as worthwhile for its own sake.

The last few centuries have been unkind to crafts. The various technical revolutions in the last 150 years have killed off many and replaced them with mass produced consumer goods. Of course the products of great skill are still valued, but largely for economic reasons. This often hollows out the meaning of craft.

One craft that has vastly grown in prominence is cooking. Indeed, it is perhaps the craft that plays the widest and deepest social role in the modern world. We have never been more invested in skilled cooking, both at home and especially in restaurants. Despite being a notoriously difficult business that imposes a taxing, unhealthy lifestyle, restaurants are born and die constantly. There is a seemingly bottomless well of passion for the restaurant.

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Natalie Wynn - head and shoulders - faces the camera directly, appearing nearly nude. She artfully holds an apple with the fingertips of both hands, nails red to match. Blond hair tumbles down out of a flower headband, all set against a green and floral background.

May 30, 2024
by Aesthetics for Birds
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How Autofiction, the Buzzy Literary Category, Helps Us Make Sense of YouTube

Natalie Wynn - head and shoulders - faces the camera directly, appearing nearly nude. She artfully holds an apple with the fingertips of both hands, nails red to match. Blond hair tumbles down out of a flower headband, all set against a green and floral background.

What follows is an essay by James MacDowell.

The second most visited website globally (surpassed only by Google’s homepage), YouTube reportedly currently hosts over 14 billion videos, making it by far the most consequential moving image repository on earth. Yet, despite its unprecedented cultural significance—and despite now being almost twenty years old—startlingly little discussion of the platform seems interested in treating YouTube as an artistic medium. Approaching YouTube as art could take many forms. This essay asks whether there might be a place on YouTube for one artistic genre that’s become increasingly influential in the twenty-first century, especially in literature: autofiction.

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