Month: April 2018

“To regard beauty as a luxury, adornment, or a social signifier is to miss the true potential of the experience.”

-John Armstrong

John Armstrong’s quote reflects his views on the nature of beauty. This quote means that beauty is cheapened when it is held as something to be enjoyed only as a status symbol or class- based luxury. In essence, if we only treat beauty as something for high-end people to enjoy and not as a universal truth to be seen by everyone, we miss out on the point of it. Beauty is everywhere in the world, from the biggest buildings and mountains to the smallest insects, cells, and molecules. Society tends to put beauty in a box, emphasizing standards and ideals that don’t really reflect all the potential that beauty holds. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, so depending on who the beholder is, different things will be beautiful. Everyone can find beauty in something, and anything at all may hold beauty for someone. To one person, nature may be beautiful in all its grandiose splendor, while another finds nature buggy and dirty and gross. That same person may love the soaring architecture of a city, or delicate strokes of a painted picture.

Links:

http://amueller1.uneportfolio.org/eng-110/title/ (Project)

http://weneedfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/ (Image)

https://aeon.co/essays/can-beauty-help-us-to-become-better-people

What Is Art For?

Outline: I want to focus in on Schiller’s ideas of the drives. I would like to use Anthony Mueller’s project in order to help me analyze and explain these ideas. After an introduction, I want to:

-Explain Schiller’s ideas

-Showcase Anthony’s project

-Give examples of both drives

-Explain the overlapping of drives to create beauty

-relate it to my ideas on human nature

In order to revise my paper for the better, I plan to expand certain ideas and interject stronger opinions into it. Ultimately, my goal is to smooth out the rough edges of my paper and to produce a more interesting paper with a clearer argument. Most importantly, I need to put forth a stronger personal opinion on art from my own perspective. This is tough, because I wholeheartedly agree with Schiller’s ideas of the sense and form drives. I also will need to find an effective way to incorporate more modes of communication into my paper, such as music and nature photography. I need to organize my thoughts more clearly to do this correctly. My biggest challenge will be incorporating my own opinion into it in a distinct and strong way. This is hard because personally, I see beauty in almost everything, making a narrow selection challenging for me to decide on or talk about. It’s also hard because my opinions on what makes things beautiful are very neatly in line with Schiller’s, seeing as I’ve always strongly believed in a dichotomy of two opposite-oriented aspects of human nature based on logic and emotion overlapping to create products greater than the sum of their parts. This is a very specific belief, but one that I have held for quite some time. (My second paper went into detail about my ideas on the two sides of humanity) and Schiller’s ideas line up extremely neatly with my core belief about human nature. If I can’t find a way to make a distinct opinion, I’ll just write a paragraph or so explaining this as I just have; that I have always believed in essentially what Schiller articulates.