Aestheticism, or maybe just my aestheticism seems to come as a surplus to life. Other things need to have some kind of order to them before I can appreciate things aesthetically, this order provides the opportunity for surplus to occur. For instance: food. Haute cuisine is something lost on me, I’m not a “foodie” but I think it illustrates my point well. It seems to require a basis first, maybe some form of abundance or supply of the basic requirements of food and then the fancy stuff can begin. It’s like, “ok, I have food, I have food for every day of the week for the next year. So, what can I do now?” And then the aestheticism takes place, food can then become a medium of art.
And then philosophy. Or knowledge for knowledge’s sake. It seems to become more attractive to me when some other order in life is found first. Philosophy as a pleasurable pursuit, as an aestheticism, as surplus. I can be scornful of things merely for their own sake but maybe not for any other reason than there lies a dissatisfaction elsewhere, something out of place, something out of order.
To return to the haute cuisine. Does a culture use such aestheticism to boast its abundance? On one hand we may have an impoverished country unable to feed its population and on the other we have fine dining which is ironically small! Haute cuisine is typically small portions. It’s odd that the abundance isn’t displayed as a feast but as a small delicacy. Why is this? Is there an implication of abundance by the choice to only serve small delicate food? Would an impoverished country, to feign abundance serve a feast?
Haute cuisine is lots of very small courses, but it doesn’t imply a small meal; it was nouvelle cuisine that came to have a bad name for that. The portions in haute cuisine are very complex, intricate dishes, the point being that a lot of time and effort goes into a lot of dishes so it is a luxury. You can afford to take two bites of quail breast confit with a kumquat jus and move onto the next course - it’s still conspicuous consumption.
On a related note, in some African cultures big women are seen as a status symbol for men, just as in the west slim ones are. Particularly in polygamous societies, a man who can afford to keep several wives well-fed is a sign of success.
It sounds as bad as that Monty Python movie, The Meaning of Life, where the character Mr. Creosote does all that gross stuff with food, I mean really really gross. I couldn’t watch it all.
Babette’s Feast, now, that was truly lovely… cooking as high art done with so much love.
That’s the one. It’s absolutely not a gross-out comedy, at all - it’s clever, artful and celebrates food. It’s a quirky classic. It gets 100% at Rotten Tomatoes rottentomatoes.com/m/tampopo/
It just has a scene with an egg that left a lasting impression on my adolescent mind in the late 80s. If you Google “tampopo egg” you’ll see a Youtube clip. No nudity or shock, but you might not want to watch it at work.
I see what you mean. Those egg and oyster scenes were very, what IS the word, evocative… kind of reminiscent, metaphorically, of the way a fertilized chicken’s egg is noted by the speck of blood on the yolk. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, though. It did have a certain erotic shock value, but it wasn’t that much of a gross out… not like those Creosote food scenes anyway.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I’ve not much too offer but I noticed the two of you were talking of food/eroticism. There does seems to be a strange relationship between food and sex i.e. consumption. But maybe that’s more due to the sensual nature of the two of them.
Have either of ya’ll seen The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which takes place in Botswana? Precious Ramotswe, the great detective, is big and beautiful. I just love that show.
But it’s no surprise big is found to be beautiful, a moderate big though I’ll add - it’s strange that too big then becomes repulsive as opposed to more beautiful - there are those ancient venus carvings, the fertility goddess, and she was certainly more curvier than something a ‘Western’ culture today would depict. And the African women, are they genetically inclined to be bigger? So, a good-sized woman in such a culture is attractive simply because of good ole’ genes. Maybe there’s the divide, the aestheticism, to move away from gene satisfaction into aesthetic satisfaction? Big may be natural (and natural can be attractive) but is it beautiful? If beauty were to be an ideal of the aesthetic, and not the genetic, not the mere-natural, then big being natural would not be beautiful…I don’t know why but that sounds Christian . If that’s a legit theory, the question is who or why would one prefer natural rather than aesthetic? What does it take to make the shift from one to the other and can one be better than the other?
I remember having a conversation with one man in which I asked him what kind of women he found attractive (as in, what qualities does a woman have to possess to be considered beautiful in his eyes), and he said that he thought all women were beautiful. Of course I didn’t believe him, so I started probing further and throwing out different types of women and asking him which one he thought was more beautiful. He, again, said that he thought all of them were beautiful (fat, skinny, different race, etc.) but in a different way. So, conversation pretty much ended in him saying that he thought that the idea of a woman itself was beautiful and that’s why he did not care too much in discriminating between varieties.
Are some men really this undiscriminating, or was he just trying to avoid answering my question?
When it comes to aesthetics, I believe that proportion has a place in the way we humans view beauty. I seem to remember reading something about the golden ratio in art. Da Vinci certainly knew it. Look at his Vitruvian Man and other drawings and paintings.
So I would say that beauty isn’t so much a question of size as it is of proportion. A sense of proportion seems to be innate in the psyche or something like that, and certain Fibonacci ratios are found throughout nature.
He’s full of it! Ask him if he would date an obese woman, or one hideously deformed. Unless of course he’s asexual, and is satisfied with just the idea of a woman. Is he a monk of some-sort?
You could be onto something there. But, I’m just thinking of obesity and anorexia, both could be said to be excessively out of proportion yet they both give rise to different reactions. What might be the cause of this difference? Personally I react with disgust/contempt to obesity and anorexia is fairly gross too but my reaction to it pales in comparison to my reaction to obesity, maybe that’s just me…but nonetheless there does seem less of a stigma to anorexia than obesity. Maybe it’s sympathy, at least the anorexic tried to be slim , apologies, that’s just a cruel joke.
Much of this bias towards slimness is due to looksism, a subset of women’s oppression, and cultural conditioning. If you take the bias out, I think you’ll find that it’s the sense of proportion that drives aesthetics regardless of gender. That’s why modern art such as that of cubism, surrealism, and other oddities makes such an impact and tells us something about the world the artist is seeing. There is one artist who even includes the entire history of art in his large-scape panel paintings, Irving Norman. At the great exhibit of his art in Sacramento, I found myself so absorbed and drawn into the works that I didn’t want to leave… but their “aesthetic” is very disturbing while at the same time so compelling that it becomes a world of its own that mirrors much of ours.
Ask him if he would date an obese woman, or one hideously deformed. Unless of course he’s asexual, and is satisfied with just the idea of a woman. Is he a monk of some-sort?
, apologies, that’s just a cruel joke. 