Research Questions
Aesthetics
Taste, art, and whether anyone can be wrong about beauty.
Opening your questions…
Research Questions
Aesthetics
Taste, art, and whether anyone can be wrong about beauty.
13 questions
Where to begin
Can someone be wrong about what's beautiful?We speak of taste as personal, then argue as though someone has missed the truth.
- Can something ugly be great art?Goya's black paintings, a scream in a symphony, a novel built to bore you. Some of the most admired work is hard to enjoy.Pick one of 4
- Can you separate the art from the artist?The work that changed your life was made by someone who did terrible things. Nothing in it has changed, except what you know.Pick one of 4
- Does knowing change it?A piece of writing moves you to tears. Then you learn a machine wrote every word. Does that change it?
- The aura on your screenYou know the Sistine Chapel from images. If you went, what exactly would you be going for?
- The blade and the canvasIf you were angry enough at what it stood for, could you ever be right to put a blade through a painting?
- The work you grew intoName a book, painting, film, or piece of music you first dismissed and later came to value. What changed in you that let you see it differently?
- What damage have you chosen not to repair?Restoration can preserve an object while erasing part of what makes it yours.
- What is art for?A song, a line of a poem, a painting you can't stop thinking about. None of them is useful, and none of them will leave you alone.
- What is your boredom worth?You spend an hour with a difficult book, a painting, an album, and get nothing. Nothing opens. What is the honest verdict?Pick one of 3
- What story do you love that has no lesson?A work can enlarge a question instead of reducing it to a message.
- What would you still love if no one could ever see you loving it?Private pleasure, public approval, and the preferences that survive without an audience.
- Why do you go looking for stories that make you cry?People pay to weep for characters who never lived. Aristotle thought tragedy left its audience cleaner for it.
