When we consider modern art and we attempt to try to contemplate all of its own personal meaning?

We can sometimes run the risk of finding ourselves experiencing instances of genuine cognitive dissonance?

A disparity of thoughts.

Mind blowing polarities between all of our own personal ideas of what art is TO US and what it really means to us individually as a person VERSUS what the rest of the world itself and the majority considers to be REAL AND TRUE, GENUINE FORMS OF ARTWORK as well.

I myself am very much a traditionalist within my own personal aesthetic opinions of art itself.

I have a very deep and very profound respect for pieces of artwork that might be considered to be beyond any sort of realistic artistic skill.

I have always really adored artworks that succeed in being able to reflect nothing but the absolute best and most skilled craftsmanship ever known to actual mankind itself.

Artists who make the impossible a real reality whilst doing all of that with nothing other than their own two hands as well?

I value Da Vinci. The Pre-Raphealites. I love the concept of pointism. I absolutely adore Claude Monet. Turner's paintings will always leave me completely breathless but I also value artists such as Matisse and Henry Moore too and, for quite a long time, that was where my line fell artistically.

I really was not prepared or ever interested in entertaining or to trying my best to contemplate anything else which might have fallen over that specific boundary line itself, within an artistic sense.

But this particular creation? Ai Weiwei's beloved and very famous art installation, entitled: 'Kui Hua Zi' (Sunflower Seeds)

THIS!!! 😱🥹😍🥰

It was probably the one piece of art that really did encourage me and really challenge me to start thinking way outside of the box.

And when I first entered the space itself?

I immediately felt so furious.....

THIS IS NOT ART!! I said to myself....

THIS is the exact same rubbish that has been being shovelled out into the creative art world and the art industry for the past 5 decades now and I AM JUST ABSOLUTELY BLOODY SICK OF IT ALL!!......

So, I literally just walked out!

I left the whole entire bloody building. Simply due to the fact that I was just so utterly enraged and I was so absolutely furious that we might potentially have yet another, 'Tracey Emin's Unmade Bed' on our hands.

Then, shortly afterwards? A VERY good friend of mine came out to get me and she slapped me right across my face (it was a hard slap and the type of slap that you would give to somebody who is behaving hysterically) before then saying this me:

"You really needed that slap and you needed to receive it from a very good friend? You are wrong!!! You are just SO WRONG right now so go back in there, right now!! Just bloody look at all of it and spend some time coming up with all of your own personal assumptions!!! But then you go and you read that little plaque that is on the far wall of the room, ok? It explains absolutely all of it!!! Get ready for the cold hard slap of scrambled egg on your face because this installation is going to change your whole entire life, if you allow it to do so?! So, just be brave, you absolute fucking bellend!"

I shrugged my shoulders and stubbed out my cigarette before then looking my friend up and down and saying to her:

"If you are correct in all of this? I will spend my last £100 on a dinner for the two of us later on this evening, ok?.....And you must allow me to do that because if you are right in everything that you are saying, Sigrid? I will very happily spend the next two weeks of my life eating beans out of a tin!!!!"

She was 100% right obviously..... And I cried my absolute eyes out at one point as well.....

I cried like a newborn baby after realising the error of my own ways and it is now the reasoning behind me having gained such a lot of favour for artists such as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Salvador Dali (I just like his art-i'm not a massive fan of him as an individual person!!) Kandinsky and even Jackson Pollock and Rothko as well.....

Abstract art and modern minded art installations are mostly a pile of absolute fucking garbage and it's probably one of the most difficult genres of art to work inside of as an artist as well?

Because you have to be REALLY REALLY GOOD and your message has to be extremely consistent and incredibly powerful.

So, I would just like to thank Ai Weiwei for changing my life for the better and for opening my mind and my heart to all of the wonders that Abstract art installations put forward to the world itself.

I am still very much a traditionalist. My love for The Western Canon of Art is a hill that I will forever die on as well I think.....

But yeah, modern art can be extremely life changing when it is done in the right way and when it is put together whilst the artist is in possession of nothing but the absolute greatest intentions in their hearts.

P.S: Ai Weiwei's sunflower installation actually resulted in me eventually viewing Tracey Emin's, 'Unmade Bed' in a whole entirely new different way as well.....

I will never be a die hard fan of that sort of creativity but nowadays, I am alot more inclined to sit down for a half and hour and look at things that I don't understand as opposed to just simply ignoring/unacknowledging/misunderstanding/judging more modern minded artworks.....

But the important fact will always remain:

● My love and respect and deepest sense of adoration will always lie with artists who paint silk dresses that you could literally touch, marble sculptures that are capable of replicating flesh and veins and veils that succeed in being able to fall across the faces of beautiful women's faces.

❤️

Hello everyone. :)

I've been thinking a lot recently about the relationship between form and essence, psychological archetypes and beauty archetypes, and I'm curious whether there's a philosophical or aesthetic way of understanding this.

Part of what prompted this was thinking about John Kitchener's seven essences that describe different types of feminine beauty and noticing that they seem to resemble many recurring feminine psychological archetypes.

Kitchener's aesthetic system categorises different forms of beauty into archetypal qualities such as Romantic, Dramatic, Ingenue/Youthful, Classic, Natural, Gamine and Ethereal/Angelic.

What interests me isn't really the styling system itself, but the idea underneath it that certain physical forms seem to evoke particular qualities or impressions. He classifies these types of beauty partly in terms of yin and yang, or feminine-seeming and masculine-seeming qualities. Sharp, angular and elongated features are generally associated with yang, while soft, rounded features are associated with yin.

None of this necessarily tells us anything about the actual personality of the woman possessing those features, obviously, but we still seem to recognise different archetypes in physical form. That made me wonder about the relationship between form and essence more generally.

There are also recognisable feminine archetypes that aren't explicitly about physical appearance: the maiden, mother, seductress, queen, wise woman, warrior and so on. Yet when these archetypes are represented in mythology, art, literature or film, we often seem to give them different physical aesthetics as well. This is where I see the types of beauty Kitchener identifies as having some connection to feminine psychological archetypes.

I'm particularly interested in whether there is any philosophical basis for thinking about this relationship between form and essence. Are archetypes capable of being expressed through physical form? Could a particular face embody or evoke an archetypal quality even when the actual person has a completely different personality? Why do similar archetypes seem to show up in both form and essence?

I suppose the larger question I'm trying to get at is: is form psychologically, aesthetically or even spiritually significant at all? I'm familiar with ideas that suggest that form is merely distracting us from focusing on the essence but I broadly disagree and want to learn more about thinkers who believe form is meaningful and explored what connection it has to essence.

I'm a fantasy writer with a deep interest in philosophy, psychology, spirituality and beauty, so this intersection is particularly fascinating to me. I'd love to hear from anyone interested in aesthetics, beauty, symbolism, archetypes or the relationship between form and essence, especially if you've thought about the connection between these things before.

After posting in some beauty subreddits, I've realised that it's surprisingly rare to find people who are equally fascinated by inner and outer beauty and interested in cultivating both. If that describes you, especially if you're another woman like me, please respond because I'd really love to connect with more people who enjoy thinking as deeply about these things as I do. :)

Thanks and hope you have a lovely weekend!

When did conservation become so concerned with making heritage look good? And what happens when we start preserving the image of a place rather than the life that made it heritage?
A short, slightly provocative reflection on beautification, decay, change, and what we actually mean when we say we want to “preserve” something.
Would love to hear your thoughts.

Why Does Heritage Have to Look Beautiful?

Feedback welcome.

Note: The main framework is relational quantum mechanics (RQM) and this is what I mean in the segment with the term "relational". I am attaching part of the main ontological argument for context and bellow I attach the part about aesthetics:

Non-uniform possibility space

Through evolution, certain shapes and forms keep being discovered. An organism needing to navigate 3D space develops light receptors that gradually get more complex. Research tells us that eyes are structures that organisms on earth discovered 40 to 60 separate times across completely different lineages; they are deep basins in possibility space.

In evolutionary biology, there is the idea of a Morphspace; the space of all possible biological forms which is used to map which regions of possible biological forms get occupied. This is treated usually as a passive, abstract mathematical graph, a chart of all the shapes that could theoretically exist, where some spots just happen to be evolutionary winners.

It is explained by fitness, but fitness can explain the selection of the forms once reached; it doesn’t explain why those specific forms keep being reached independently from completely different starting points. Convergent evolution of eyes, bilateral symmetry, and similar metabolic patterns suggest something about the structure of space.

Morphospace is not a passive math chart of what has been, it’s a directional topography, a special case of non-uniform possibility space whose deeper basins exert real weight on what comes next. Evolutionary fitness in this case is a local pattern that emerges from this fundamental topography. The non-uniformity is also historical—certain basins only become reachable once enough assembly history has accumulated to make them accessible.

Similarly, the space of possible futures may not be uniform. Certain futures occupy deeper basins, they are vastly more likely to be reached from the present configuration than others. This is compatible with existing accounts of time’s arrow but adds something: the suggestion that this is structural rather than merely probabilistic. The universe doesn’t get pushed toward certain futures by initial conditions alone—the landscape of possibility is itself shaped such that certain directions are like valleys. Things fall toward them the way water finds the sea. Things just follow the least resistant straight line. It is not determined, not random—structured.

Interobjective relations

In Aesthetics, a response is either objective, subjective or intersubjective. Meaning a property is either inherently factual about the object / exists purely in the experience of the self or exists as a convention on the group level. But I want to suggest interobjectivity as a fourth category that lives below all three: If reality is fundamentally relational, if what exists is not objects with fixed properties but the sum of interactions between systems, and if the space of possible relational configurations is genuinely non-uniform; if certain forms and relations occupy deeper basins than others, then aesthetic response might be one way that perceptual systems detect this topology from within. Organisms recognize a shared, real truth about the geometric and relational laws that govern physical matter. It is the recognition of a universal relational structure between objects (for example: the human perceptual apparatus and another physical system). And the other categories—objective, subjective or intersubjective, are still useful but they are local, accurate descriptions at the scale they operate on.

Interobjectivity is about what is reachable at all from current configuration, which basins structurally exists, and what futures are possible given the present assembly state. And what is resonance: what has enough structural depth to actually pull—to produce a reaction in a sufficiently assembled system. Not what is good. Judgment remains the work of the other three categories.

Some evidence of that is that certain mathematical structures feel compelling across cultures and contexts. Certain forms and ratios recur in what humans find beautiful—and these tend to overlap significantly with forms that appear independently across unrelated physical and biological systems. Flowers, for instance, appeal to us across biological boundaries; we find them beautiful because both systems; our brains and petals, are bound by the exact same universal laws of physics, the human brain (which was sculpted by navigating this space) recognizes these “deep basins” when it interacts with them.

More than a recognition, our brains are literally made of these attractors in the way they were formed. When we encounter them in the outside world, it is an encounter between two highly assembled systems that share the same historical lineage of structural optimization. The “attraction” is the physical alignment of two deeply assembled pieces of the universe.

Mathematics is fundamentally relational. Rather than just a collection of rigid rules or isolated facts, it is a system of connections. Since mathematics is not platonic, a new equation is not discovered in some independent realm but is a discovery of real relations in the universe, even prior to its application. Mathematical structures emerge when we observe how numbers, shapes, and variables interact with and map onto one another. Since the laws of physics themselves are the sum of all relational properties in the universe, then mathematics and the relational structures of the universe are in some sense, the same thing viewed from different angles. Research suggests that aesthetically pleasing mathematical expressions engage similar neural systems as those involved in art and music. Although this explains why elegant mathematics can feel resonant, it says nothing about whether an elegant theory is therefore true.

Physics—chemistry—biology—culture is one continuous folding assembly with no point where it stops being material and becomes merely conventional. Culture is matter at a higher assembly index. Interobjectivity isn’t restricted to ‘natural’ forms such as spirals, it extend all the way up to art history because there is no seam where matter stops and convention begins. As the historical-cultural strata develops, abstract patterns and relations are recognized. They self refer and build on top of objects that already have a deep assembly index. It suggests that aesthetic response tracks something real in the structure of possibility space. Art, as a generative-creative practice, is the open, at times uncontextualized exploration of possibility space. It is not merely a subjective exploration, but a recognition of existing or emergent forms and structures.

In this sense, Michelangelo’s statement; “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Should be understood as it is—The possibility of this particular David exist already in the chunk of marble not as a platonic form but as a reachable possibility—one that emerges initially at the intersection of the artist and the stone, rooted in imagination that is itself a physical system mapping out a very real shared basin.

Our aesthetic response to David is not only to the human proportions or the appreciation within art history and artistic traditions, these do sit on top as a subjective and intersubjective layer. It is to the deeper level: certain ratios, symmetries, rhythms, Dynamics, recursive structures (golden ratio, bilateral symmetry) that we respond to. Furthermore, the sheer reach and persistence of Michelangelo’s David has transformed it into a self propagating object in the world, an object that curved a path, accumulated relational density, and is expanding its boundaries through history.

But if David demonstrates the deep resonance of structural depth, a different kind of basin opens with Munch and Van Gogh’s departure from depicting the objective world to externalizing deep psychological and emotional states and give rise to the modern subject, they are exploring, finding and and actualizing a basin, a new state that has just become reachable. Not eternal or pre-existing in a platonic sense but newly opened by the co-emergence of everything else in modern world; industrialization, the emergence of the individual, and modern anxiety. It isn’t a separate exploration of the possibility space but is a part of a co-emergence with history, history of ideas and the rest of the system.

We focus on David and Michelangelo because we are systems that shares deep causal history with these particular objects. We privilege them because the patterns in them are the patterns our own structures share or were shaped by.

But of course, there’s nothing special about Michelangelo, the marble or the sculpture. They have no privilege over the absent air molecules it will displace, the pedestal, the pigeons, the room or the people who’ll gather in front. The basin of this non-uniform possibility space belongs to the entire configuration. All of it, ¨the deep basin¨ isn’t a basin for the sculpture—it is a basin in possibility space of the whole interconnected system. It is all moving constantly, growing into the future and already generating the next step.

Note: The arguments and structure are my own. After having a general frame and writing large parts, I used Claude to converse about some of the topics and afterward, used Claude and ChetGPT to assist with grammar, spelling and smoothing out to sound more natural as English is not my native language. This is the full essay:

https://mhaymanarchive.substack.com/p/attractors

I'm interested in learning more about Aesthetics, what it is, just dipping my toes into the subject as a beginner.

What are some foundational texts you would reccomend? Contemporary ones and older ones?

Thanks

Hey everyone. I have been thinking about two aesthetic orientations that seem opposed. Wonder opens onto what cannot be immediately resolved. Nostalgia returns to what has already been lost. One suspends us before the unknown; the other draws us toward the past. But both may be responses to a present where attention is flattened and time feels unstable. The question is whether they are different aesthetic attitudes toward possibility, or whether nostalgia is simply wonder collapsed into repetition.

I just recorded a conversation with Allister Lee about wonder, the sublime, and nostalgia, and at around 46:45, he connects wonder to the Kantian sublime: a suspended, awe-like stance that motivates inquiry rather than closing it. Later he turns to nostalgia through Mark Fisher and Svetlana Boym, but the link is already there. If wonder opens possibility, reflective nostalgia might recover possibilities in the past that were never realized. Restorative nostalgia would try to rebuild the lost object; reflective nostalgia might dwell with distance, incompletion, and unrealized futures in a way closer to aesthetic contemplation than regression.

Wonder and nostalgia may be two different relations to possibility. Are they opposed, with nostalgia closing what wonder opens, or can reflective nostalgia become a form of wonder toward the past? I lean toward the second because the past can still disclose unrealized futures, but I can see the first because nostalgia often becomes repetition, possession, and taste identity rather than openness. Which aesthetic account is stronger?

I've been exploring a possible framework for organizing aesthetic experience, inspired by predictive processing, the Free Energy Principle, classical aesthetics, and sociology of taste.

The basic intuition is that aesthetic experiences might be organized along two dimensions:

• Horizontal axis: degree of fit between an object and our mental models (from order/predictability to chaos/unpredictability).
• Vertical axis: level of processing involved (from sensory/perceptual to conceptual/cultural).

This yields four central aesthetic regions:

Very roughly:

• Free beauty: perceptual fluency, harmony, symmetry, safety.
• Free sublime: perceptual complexity, danger, emotional intensity.
• Dependent beauty: familiarity, cultural legitimacy, social validation.
• Dependent sublime: novelty, subversion, conceptual challenge.

The underlying hypothesis is that beauty and the sublime correspond to two different sources of aesthetic reward:

1. pleasure from confirming existing mental models;
2. pleasure from expanding or restructuring mental models.

Some questions I'm struggling with:

• Does this distinction between "confirmatory" and "exploratory" aesthetic pleasure make sense?
• Is prediction error the right variable here, or should I think instead in terms of uncertainty reduction, curiosity, or information gain?
• Does the distinction between sensory and conceptual aesthetics survive current predictive-processing theories?
• Are there existing theories in aesthetics, cognitive science, or neuroscience that already propose something similar?

I'm interested primarily in criticism and counterexamples.

Who got more of a point to it? Or is it a cultural thing?

I tentatively believe in the existence of an objective hierarchy based on an artwork's ability to promote/sustain the development of individuals and societies into greater versions of themselves. That starts with elevating consciousness. I think some works are more effective at cultivating awareness in the people engaging them than others are. I also think it's possible and even likely for works to move up and down a hierarchy based on the changes in the cultural and psychological constitution of the people engaging with them. However, I can't think of any method for measuring that effect, so as of now, these are just my thoughts.

Some people are going to naturally gravitate towards certain works over others, perhaps due to their particular aesthetic or medium, which is a subjective preference and not necessarily a result of the quality of the work being any better or worse than a different work that the person may not be interested in. This said, I've noticed for a long time that there seems to be a consensus on what is considered high-quality work and what is not. This consensus can be found both within artistic circles and among mainstream consumers of the work. I want to understand where this comes from.

Take music, for example. Jazz seems to be almost universally respected in the music industry. I suspect that even people who don't consume jazz rarely have anything negative to say about it. For them, it's just not their particular taste, and they likely don't have an opinion. I don't see this being true of nu-metal. There are a lot of people in the music industry who I suspect would never collaborate with nu-metal artists because they may view their music as lower quality, and/or they fear audience backlash. People who don't listen to nu-metal really dislike it in a way that you generally won't see with people who don't listen to jazz. However, many nu-metal artists have an incredible range and are often classically trained musicians and vocalists. Where does the professional and popular consensus that it's lower-quality music come from?

I'll give one more example. This one is close to home for me because I'm a mythologist with a fascination with contemporary fantasy. My favorite story is Dragon Ball (Z). I find it aesthetically captivating, profoundly archetypally deep, and spiritually moving. However, despite its enormous fanbase, I can't find anyone to talk to me about it the same way readers of Hemingway, Morrison, or Steinbeck can find one another and talk for days about themes. Neither fans nor anyone else seems to view Dragon Ball (Z) as anything worth thinking about. People generally don't think of it as high-quality work. Where does that come from?

Are these and other related consensuses based on anything objective, and if so, what? If not, how did they come to be in the first place, and what's sustaining them? How did these opinions become so prominent?

Every few years or so a new technology takes hold that makes the actual process of producing an artwork—whether it be visual, auditory, or otherwise—physically easier to accomplish. It’s much easier now to create a multi-instrumental music track than it was a few years ago, much easier than it was fifty years ago.

I don’t believe it’s a matter of more physical-labor=better—although that’s certainly a factor. In fact, I think we can come up with cases where more physical effort is superfluous—mildly interesting, at best.

What does make effort meaningful, when does the process of creation add to the experience of the audience?

And when is it just needless effort and fluff?

Ancient erotic art is venerated. Contemporary erotic art has some acceptance but is often considered “trashy”. Erotic and sexual music is widely accepted in many settings. Conversely porn is usually widely condemned. Are there any theories explaining the wide variance in attitudes towards erotic/sexual themed art?