“My theory is all humanist, which is to say that it begins with humanity and it seeks humanity’s salvation in the term’s most complete sense.”

-David Alfaro Siqueiros

The Greek marble sculptures, which we have come to accept as cold stone images, were in fact painted with encaustic and turned into colorful icons.

“…subjectivity must be our point of departure”

-Sartre

It is an image of pure, untainted love and devotion which the angel admires in awe.

“Great art remains stable and unobscured because the feelings that it awakens are independent of time and place...”

-Clive Bell

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

-sir Ken Robinson

Is not the experience of aesthetic appreciation the reason we go to museums and galleries? Why should this experience be less if one hand that painted it is as praise-worthy as the other?

“The difference between the aesthetic and the economic value of art, then, may be simply explained. It is the difference between the sacred and the profane.” 

-Mark Sagoff

“Much of what we call ‘taste’ lies in the conformity between discriminations demanded by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder.”

-Clifford Geertz

Aesthetic experience occurs within the flux of life; in the breaking apart and reencountering of life; in the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony.

Nature is an order from which we are spawned and for which we feel awe. It is a natural arrangement which mirrors our own physical and mental arrangements. This makes it aesthetically pleasing by default.

We are only intelligent apes who are trying to recognize their own reflection.

Aesthetics revolve around empathy

…How do we quantify the beauty we find in somebody’s personality or in a smell?