william kent

Well-known member
If you think of Classical Greek sculpture, which operated as a gold standard for beauty for so long, you tend not to have strain. Muscles register the distribution of weight, tension, but not strain.

Federer. You look at more or less any photo of him mid-game and his face is a picture of calm. The most you get is a tightening of the jaw.

1200px-R_federer.jpg
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
It’s conception of beauty I wove have much of an appetite for. Very garish. Handle’s massiah.

Those statues were wicked though
 

william kent

Well-known member
Ok, I’ve got you.

I think sublime beauty is humbling.

Those Greek statues cuckold me with their graceful muscularity.

Cathedrals dwarf you. Those bit mosques with the onion roofs engulf you. The stars in the sky portray your insignificance.

The bibles depictions of heavenly phenomena are overcrowded; trumpets, lights, singing, strange spectacles, millions of angels, all the creatures in gods earth, etc. It all speaks to dwarfing the individual

Have you read Henry Adams' thing on 'The Dynamo and the Virgin'?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
In general it’s vulgar and crass.

If you turn up the intensity on those Greek statues you end up with steroids and comedy block men with no necks.

Similarly how sloppy the writing in the bible is. Every sentence begins with and. The Michael bay aesthetic. More more more. Louder, bigger brighter.

The graceful effortlessness is the mitigating factor here
 

luka

Well-known member
Ok, I’ve got you.

I think sublime beauty is humbling.

Those Greek statues cuckold me with their graceful muscularity.

Cathedrals dwarf you. Those bit mosques with the onion roofs engulf you. The stars in the sky portray your insignificance.

The bibles depictions of heavenly phenomena are overcrowded; trumpets, lights, singing, strange spectacles, millions of angels, all the creatures in gods earth, etc. It all speaks to dwarfing the individual

I'd take this back to what I said about convergence this morning and how you respond to these things depends on your state at the moment you meet them, and on your state throughout the course of your engagement with them. So that you may feel humbled, you may feel cuckolded or browbeaten, you may feel disinterested, you may feel that this is a magnificence you share in or etc etc etc. How do you situate yourself in relation to what is observed? What are your responses? How does the magic happen, or why does it fail to happen? And again, there are scales, just as there are scales of arousal from disinterest to near madness.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
It's also a quality of the baroque penchant of the times. Beauty was something that transcended the natural planes of reality and touched upon the spirit-realm. This gnostic notion that all material matter is the evil trapping of our divine spirits. The earthly and the natural is bad, it's what entombs the true beauty. Art must liberate it.
 

luka

Well-known member
In general it’s vulgar and crass.

If you turn up the intensity on those Greek statues you end up with steroids and comedy block men with no necks.

Similarly how sloppy the writing in the bible is. Every sentence begins with and. The Michael bay aesthetic. More more more. Louder, bigger brighter.

The graceful effortlessness is the mitigating factor here

One of the things DMT makes clear, I think, is that there are many dials you can twiddle! This is what I mean by the room of cosmic plumbing.
 

william kent

Well-known member
Once St. Gaudens took him down to Amiens, with a party of Frenchmen, to see the cathedral. Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on Adams’s mind that, for his purposes, St. Gaudens on that spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself. Great men before great monuments express great truths, provided they are not taken too solemnly. Adams never tired of quoting the supreme phrase of his idol Gibbon, before the Gothic Cathedrals:—“I darted a contemptuous look on the stately monuments of superstition.” Even in the footnotes of his history, Gibbon had never inserted a bit of humor more human than this, and one would have paid largely for a photograph of the fat little historian, on the background of Notre Dame of Amiens, trying to persuade his readers—perhaps himself,—that he was darting a contemptuous look on the stately monument, for which he felt in fact the respect which every man of his vast study and active mind always feels before objects worthy of it; but besides the humor, one felt also the relation. Gibbon ignored the Virgin, because in 1789 religious monuments were out of fashion. In 1900 his remark sounded fresh and simple as the green fields to ears that had heard a hundred years of other remarks, mostly no more fresh and certainly less simple. Without malice, one might find it more instructive than a whole lecture of Ruskin. One sees what one brings, and at that moment Gibbon brought the French Revolution. Ruskin brought reaction against the Revolution. St. Gaudens had passed beyond all. He liked the stately monuments much more than he liked Gibbon or Ruskin; he loved their dignity; their unity; their scale; their lines; their lights and shadows; their decorative sculpture; but he was even less conscious than they of the force that created it all,—the Virgin, the Woman,—by whose genius “the stately monuments of superstition” were built, through which she was expressed. He would have seen more meaning in Isis with the cow’s horns, at Edfoo, who expressed the same thought. The art remained, but the energy was lost even upon the artist.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
Yeah there's a scale isn't there. I mean, I don't have the answers. I just admire entertainments decision to invent an entirely new and unique philosophy of beauty and it's our job to humbly assist him in his work

things were getting way too postmodern on here with all of your cybernetics and simulacra
 

luka

Well-known member
Subvert, entertainment has upped the ante, he's creating a whole aesthetic philosophy from scratch now. He's going to crystallise the very meaning of beauty. We've moved on from the youtubes.



If you can't beat 'em....
 

luka

Well-known member
No, the most beautiful song is one tribe featuring gem- what have you done.

It allows us to visit a achingly beautiful world that we can't inhabit, and on the one hand we're overcome with the beauty and on the other the sadness of not being able to stay. A bit like the comedown off nice drugs can feel.
 
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