Beauty

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From a combination of the art thread and the what do you do to get ready thread.

What do you find beautiful? What is beauty to you?What is you idea of beauty?

― Ed, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Subways, bridges, wine bottles, books, jackhammers, parking lots, even certain forms of pollution. Basically, any evidence of civilized life. Beauty's antagonist = carelessness = me, depressed. And then I start ranting about the hippies again.

― Kris, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

To recognize the beauty of subway stations is urgent and key! Kris and I both live in the Bay Area, and thus have the honor of frequenting BART stations, which I think of as 20th century mosques for the worship of speed and luxury.

― Sterling Clover, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Well, my mirror never lies and all.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

If only BART had anything to do with speed and luxury! You should see the subway stations in Stockholm, or Moscow...talk about sanctified environments! To me subways represent an ideal of public transportation that will never be sorted out properly in the bay area, something distant and beautiful like Haley's Comet, that I can only see periodically because it doesn't really exist where I live. In my dream world the entire United States will sit above a vast network of supersonic, underground rail blitzing through vacuumed, frictionless tunnels: every city, town, and hamlet now a destination. It will be pure capitalism, unburdened by suburban intertia, every place in competition to attract the money and the fancy of the rest of the nation, the mayors now ruling as entrepeneurs rather than as of guardians of civil predictability. There's FUN in 'dem daa hills! The casino-bound family from Charlotte forced to converse with the nightclub-bound teens from D.C. sitting across, both changing trains in Kansas City, perhaps one or the other will stop at the Negro Leagues Hall of Fame if the layover allows it. The rebirth of the frontier spirit -- Bored in Pennsylvania? Try the Wines in Mendocino! Thank god I find cars beautiful too, else I might be a pessimist after all.

― Kris, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...but we all pretty much agree on ugly, don't we?"

― Joe, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Mango margaritas are pretty damn gorgeous. They're up there with Richey Manic. Yes this is a serious answer.

I love cities, cities are beautiful to me.

― Ally, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Details. The peices of skin you sometimes see. Wrists and clavicles and the part of the chest when the second button is undone. The background colors of Netherland 17th century still lives . The way ornages feel and tulips smell.

― anthony, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

beauty is in the eye of the buttholder

― Geoff, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Beauty is a bottle of Stoley, a Gluecifer record, and your own spit and firecrackers. Girls are cute in the morning, but sometimes they aren't. And who cares about the morning.

― Otis Wheeler, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Beauty = projection of solipsism = fear of Other = dud

― tarden, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Interesting you should mention tube stations. One of the most stunningly beautiful new constructions in london in recent years is Canary Warf Jubilee station. Its like some long forgotten buried cathedral. You don't expect so much space underground. And the acreages of smoth grey concrete are something so utterly dumbfounding.

― Ed, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Beauty is in the imperfections, not the perfections. For something or someone to be beautiful, there must be some flaw to balance the perfection or I can't look at it. It all goes along with my "you can go as far as you like in any one direction, so long as you go equally as far in the opposite direction" philosophy.

― masonic boom, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The unexpected. Things are more beautiful if they're of a form or in a place you don't expect.

― Paul Strange, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Beauty is where you find it. But remember kids - truth does not equal beauty.

On this subject I found Shrek most distasteful .It seemed to suggest that whether you are a blandly drawn princess or a rather imaginatively rendered ogre you beauty lies within. As long as you aren't short.

― Pete, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

If beauty is truth and truth is beauty, then I'm a lie.

― masonic boom, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

What is beauty. Oh, God. Not sure where to begin with this. I think there's a lot to be said for the 18th century notion that beauty is a (bodily) sentiment rather than the romantic concept of beauty as a (mental) faculty. However the aesthetic sentiment -- in Hume say -- is supposed to be regulated by social systems, and while there's some allowance made for individual response, it can still be educated or trained. I find myself torn between barren wilderness landscapes, and the Highlands in particular, and run-down factory buildings in the Midlands. Both quite traditional ideas of beauty I'm afraid.

― alex thomson, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I don't think there's anything wrong with traditional ideas of beauty. Somethings are by their nature timeless. Things that are beatiful and constant tend to stay that way. its interesting to compare the timeless ideas with the transient ones, like ideas about human beauty which seem to be far from fixed from day to day let alone across generations. I think we are conditioned by modern ideas about fashion to think that beauty has to be the thing most current, and shoudl change by the hour so we are suprised when we find beautiful the things our parents found beautiful.

― Ed, Thursday, 12 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

six months pass...

Who was it who over on I LOVE MUSIC said 'pah' to beauty, that they just weren't interested in things being beautiful. Maybe Otis. Anyway, I found that was an intriguing, and totally alien concept, especially when he insisted he meant it. Has there been a major art movement that has taken this as its mantra? I'm a bit ignorant in such matters.

― N., Monday, 11 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Jean Debuffet (I think I spelt that correctly) founded the 'Art Brut' or 'Raw Art' movement also known as 'Outsider Art' and kind of defined it as 'against beauty'. He mainly collected the art of the mentally ill. He said 'beauty is a tethering pole, a phantom that needs to be destroyed' - that's a bad paraphrase.

― maryann, Monday, 11 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Thank you Maryann, that is exactly what I wanted to know. Was Art Brut the inspiration for the Phantom Menace?

― N., Tuesday, 12 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

as well as Tristan Tzara talked about the terror of Beauty and the Futurists talked about Beauty as an impedioment to truth

― anthony, Tuesday, 12 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

So why did the Futurists make such beautiful paintings?

― N., Tuesday, 12 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Carlo Carrà's Leaving The Theatre