Aesthetics for Birds

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art for Everyone

October 4, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What’s So Wrong with Free Expression, Abusive Art, and Understanding?

What follows is a guest post by John Rapko about the recent Guggenheim Museum controversy. The controversy On Friday, September 22, a friend sent me an e-mail alerting me to an on-line petition. This time the issue was that the Guggenheim Museum in New York City had released a list of the names of the artists and their works to be included in the upcoming show “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.” Among the 150 works were three involving live animals, including a video of an installation by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu wherein dogs were strapped into opposing treadmills, where they ran in place, tugged, and snarled at each other to exhaustion. The two other pieces are by artists better-known outside China: a notorious piece by Huang Yong Ping, “Theater of the World”, which shows a large structure wherein many reptiles and insects have been placed, … Continue reading

September 28, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Site-specific Art: Robert Smithson, Ooldouz Alaei Novin, and the Marble House Project

What follows is a guest post by Shannon M. Mussett (Utah Valley University). I am an academic philosopher. This means that my contact with my peers consists mainly in electronic communication, or, a few times a year (if I am lucky) a conference—varying in length from a day to a week. If I am very lucky, there may be an occasional workshop peppered here and there throughout the course of a decade. Academic philosophy conferences consist largely of sitting in ill-lit rooms, on uncomfortable chairs, listening to someone either read a paper at you, or click through power point slides where the gist of the paper is presented to you. (Christy Wampole’s Conference Manifesto pretty much nails it). Afterwards, questions and dialogue follow—which can be more or less lively—depending on many factors, most of which boil down to how much coffee is available and whether or not people are in … Continue reading

September 27, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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The Aesthetics Of Rock Climbing

The pleasures of rock climbing and the pleasures of philosophy turn out to be strangely similar. So starts an essay by AFB’s Thi Nguyen for The Philosophers’ Mag. The aesthetics of climbing is an aesthetics of the climber’s own motion, and an aesthetics of how that motion functions as a solution to a problem. There is, for the climber, a very special experience of harmony available – a harmony between one’s abilities and the challenges they meet. His wide-ranging essay is ultimately about rock climbing, but touches on dance and proprioception, as well as games, sports, and problem solving. Check out the whole thing here. Image credit: Mark Doliner via Flickr

September 15, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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What’s Wrong with Rebranding?

Aesthetics for Birds has recently undergone two semi-rebrandings – first last year and again this year. As such, we thought it would be interesting to have a discussion about the nature of brand identities, what rebrandings really are, and how we should feel about them. What follows is a conversation about these topics between AFB’s Alex King and Thi Nguyen.

July 20, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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Emergent Poetry and Google Translate

Google Translate’s Emergent Poetry Some of you will be familiar with computer poetry, poetic compositions generated by computers using algorithms. Some of you may even be familiar with computer prose, as the book The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed (text here). There are lots of things to say about this. Who’s the author? Is it really poetry? And what does it say if computer poetry passes the Turing test? Last week, I stumbled upon something new in this neighborhood, care of Google Translate. You might think this would be generated by inputting something funny (but promising if you think about it) like assembly instructions or political speeches–or even something translated into a different language, then translated back. Instead, this Google Translate poetry takes as input a single, repeated Japanese hiragana character. As you can see above, the returns are surreal and delightful. (For all of these, I’ve used ‘ke’, け.) See here and here for … Continue reading

July 10, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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A Brief History Of Beauty

“Beauty has become a taboo topic among many practitioners of art and design,” writes Michael Spicher (Boston University) in an article for Architecture Boston. “Yet it’s clear we still need beauty in our lives. … People may disagree about which objects are beautiful (or their degree of beauty), but no one seems to disagree that beautiful, pleasurable things exist. We should strive for beauty, so that we may create or experience it.” Spicher traces the history of thinking about beauty in the West, from its more objective beginnings in Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, to its current status as subjective (at best). Pop on over for a primer! Image credit: Met Museum, detail from “Maria Louisa of Parma” by Laurent Pécheux (1765)

June 29, 2017
by C. Thi Nguyen
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Personal Aesthetic Categories, Therapist Edition

One of the things I collect is people’s odd little invented aesthetic categories. They’re usually personal, often work-related, and usually arise from a human soul being endlessly confronted with the same set of relationships and experiences, in the work-grind, and trying to cope. I, for example, have a very private list of the most tragicomically overreaching introductory sentences from student papers. (“Since the time of the dinosaurs, man has yearned to define the Quest for Truth.” Etc.) Here’s a particularly satisfying one I just collected, from a therapist friend who asked to remain anonymous. (Photo credit: Peter Barker) “Top ten facial tissue handling patterns by patients engaging in psychotherapy: 1. The relieved post-sobbing messy scrunch ball. 2. The careful triangle; unused. 3. The careful triangle, folded before crying; used for gentle dabbing at gentle tears. 4. The careful triangle, folded after crying to hide the snot. 5. Messy, self-conscious, post-sobbing squares. 6. The anxious … Continue reading

May 23, 2017
by Aesthetics for Birds
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INDIAN AESTHETICS: RASA THEORY

There is a familiar puzzle in philosophy of art: How do fictions provoke real feelings in us? This raises other questions: Are those real feelings? Do we feel real fear, or some fear-like thing when we watch a scary movie? How do actors or written words get us to feel those things, whatever they are? Over at the podcast The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Peter Adamson (LMU Munich, King’s College London) talks about the rasa tradition that starts with Bharata’s Nāṭya-Śāstra (Treatise on Drama) and its distinctive approach to answering these questions. The text dates back to 200 BCE – 200 CE, so it’s roughly as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. What is rasa? An aesthetic response elicited by the drama. It’s not the emotion itself, but it derives from the emotion. There are eight kinds of rasa, corresponding to eight basic emotional dispositions: the erotic the comic the pathetic the furious the heroic the … Continue reading

May 13, 2017
by Anthony C.
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PEPE IS DEAD! LONG LIVE PEPE?

This is an update to an earlier story that follows new developments in the Pepe meme story: Pepe’s death! Faithful readers of this site will be familiar with the saga of the internet meme Pepe the Frog. (For those of you who missed it, my earlier post on Pepe and the nature and value of internet memes is here.) The latest update: Pepe’s death! But first, a bit of background: