Concepts in aesthetics

Today’s culture is obsessed with looking younger, it seems like a contest that many American’s are trying to win. Youth is defined as the time between childhood and adult. Men and women today are willing to do anything possible to look and feel young, regardless of how expensive it can become. Some people tend to spend too much money, or sometimes they risk their own lives. This trend is due to the technological revolution, miracle wrinkle creams or Botox, expensive and sometimes fatal cosmetic…

The power of empire has long rested on the cultural and political Othering (i.e. systematic alienation and/or exclusion) of subordinate groups by dominating imperial forces, and the Romantic aesthetic of beauty necessarily reflects the larger ideological framework of Orientalism and the exotic Other. As first outlined in Edward Said’s seminal 1978 work Orientalism, European conceptions of ‘the East’ have been largely constructed. For example…

Caravaggio took Italian Baroque art in a new direction. One of the biggest changes in Caravaggio’s works is that instead of sticking to the norm of painting a generalized, almost stylized version of the subject matter, he painted with intense realism. He painted every detail that he saw. From the dirt under a person’s fingernails, to the perfect brown spots on rotting fruit. This actually caused Caravaggio to run into some trouble with his paintings. When commissioned to do a painting of Saint…

I feel that the Marilyn Monroe silkscreen prints and the Silverspot both were objects or “images” that Andy Warhol felt needed to be remembered. Marilyn Monroe passed away not long before the prints were made. The silverspot was also an endangered species. I think that Warhol wanted people to have something to remember them both by. He put them in a whole new perspective that attracts people to them that may otherwise have not thought twice about them. An “image” is a person or object that has…

This is an interesting topic and something I had definitely not considered prior to enrolling in this class. After having read about Bazin and his views on film Realism, it makes sense that he would disagree with directors manipulating the “realness” of a film for the sake of the image (Blakeney, 2009). Bazin was a stickler for the importance of realness for film to be considered art (Blakeney, 2009) so in his opinion films should not have over-the-top editing or manipulation and should rely on…

The treatment of sexuality is commonly used as a source of pleasure for the viewer when portraying the idealized woman. Women are constantly used in art for pleasure and the goddess of love, Venus, is frequently used as the perfect woman to gaze upon. Titian met the viewers’ attention when using Venus in his piece Venus of Urbino, 1538. However, another art painting attracted more attention when depicting a nude woman in a similar style of Venus, Olympia, 1863, by Edouard Manet. Manet’s use of…

My first impression when I viewed Mouth (for L'Oréal), New York, by Irving Penn, was wow, it’s so beautiful and colorful. When you look at this picture, you see a person’s lips with several different lipstick colors on them. The subject of this painting is obviously the lipstick, the colors in the pictures are different shades of red, purple, pink and brown, they are the focus point. The lipstick makes texture on the lips, creating a beautiful three-dimensional effect. I see several lines in…

In Troilus and Criseyde, there is an outgoing conflict regarding the determination of fate. The debate lies on whether the characters’s destiny has been predetermined by divine forces or is, on the other hand, defined by the individual’s decisions. Nonetheless, the characters in the poem appear to be of the belief that their judgment holds no role on the outcome of the events, as these have been already determined by mightier forces. Such is the case of Troilus, who upon being offered Pandare’s…

How far would you go for love? Happiness? Fame?. The pieces of literature I will be analysing for this essay are “The Monkeys Paw”, “The Devil in Tom Walker”, and “The Masque of the Red Death”. I believe that in all romantic literature works, the protagonists has an urge or pull to do something, but gets warned a couple times before something bad happens to stop to walk away. The protagonists doesn’t listen and has to face the consequences(With the exception of “The Monkey's Paw”) The first…

Kiss of Rain Walking through parks and not well-known places was something of a hobby of mine. I drew inspiration from undiscovered side streets and recesses of parks. Sometimes I would even stumble across a moment that deserved to be captured by either my camera around my neck or my phone. I always had one or the other on me for these exact purposes. At a park is where I was at this precise moment. One of my favorites actually. No matter how much I kept coming back here there was always…