Tag: beauty

Typical & Atypical Aesthetic Taste

~ cafebedouin

“Aesthetic experience seems both regular and idiosyncratic. On one hand, there are powerful regularities in what we tend to find attractive versus unattractive (e.g., beaches versus mud puddles). On the other hand, our tastes also vary dramatically from person to person: what one of us finds beautiful, another might find distasteful. What is the nature of such differences? They may in part be arbitrary—e.g., reflecting specific past judgments (such as liking red towels over blue ones because they were once cheaper). However, they may also in part be systematic—reflecting deeper differences in perception and/or cognition. We assessed the systematicity of aesthetic taste by exploring its typicality for the first time across seeing and hearing. Observers rated the aesthetic appeal of ordinary scenes and objects (e.g., beaches, buildings, and books) and environmental sounds (e.g., doorbells, dripping, and dialtones). We then measured “taste typicality” (separately for each modality) in terms of the similarity between each individual’s aesthetic preferences and the population’s average. The data revealed two primary patterns. First, taste typicality was not arbitrary but rather was correlated to a moderate degree across seeing and hearing: people who have typical taste for images also tend to have typical taste for sounds. Second, taste typicality captured most of the explainable variance in people’s impressions, showing that it is the primary dimension along which aesthetic tastes systematically vary.”

-Yi-Chia Chen. Andrew Chang, et al. “‘Taste typicality’ is a foundational and multi-modal dimension of ordinary aesthetic experience.” Current Biology. March 1, 2022.

If you are an aesthetic weirdo in one dimension, such as with music, you’re probably also going to like weirdo art. Obvious but also interesting. De gustibus non est disputandum.

John Donahue on Food & Drink for the Soul

~ cafebedouin

“One way, and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask oneself too, and the question is, when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture? But when had you last a great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards? And I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing. They’re like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul.

Second thing, I think, a question to always ask oneself — who are you reading? Who are you reading? And where are you stretching your own boundaries? Are you repetitive in that? And one of the first books I read as a child — we had no books at home, but a neighbor of ours had all these books, and he brought loads of books. That’s how I ruined my eyes, like, and I have to wear glasses. [laughs] But one of the first books I read was a book by Willie Sutton, the bank robber, who was doing 30 years for robbing banks. And in the book somebody asked Willie, and they said, “Willie, why do you rob banks?” And Willie said, “Because that’s where the money is.” And why do we read books? Because that’s where the wisdom is.

So like my professors in colleges always used to say, if you were doing an essay or doing a thesis, the first thing you have to do is read the primary sources and trust your own encounter with them before you go to the secondary literature. And I’d say to anybody who is listening to us, who is interested in spirituality and who is maybe being coaxed a little away from believing it’s all a naïve, doomed, illusion-ridden thing — pick up something like Meister Eckhart or some one of the mystics and just have a look at it, and you could be surprised what an exciting adventure and homecoming it could become.”

-John Donahue, “The Inner Landscape of Beauty.” On Being with Krista Tippett. February 28, 2008.

Best Argument for Wearing a Mask, Post-Pandemic

~ cafebedouin

“Blöthar says wearing his has its advantages.

‘For one thing, people won’t really know what you look like, and that’s a great advantage, especially when you’re trying to commit armed robbery at your local convenience store,’ Blöthar says. ‘The other thing, especially if you’re really ugly, which most humans are … at least you get to walk around and not be as ugly as you usually are. There’s a big plus to that. Another big plus is other people don’t have to look at your ugly mug. And their days are not ruined.'”

—Blöthar the Berserker quoted in Chris Harris, “The Masked Bands’ Survival Guide to Your New Masked Life.” Spin. July 28, 2020.

Or, another way of looking at it.

“Wearing a face mask is simple, cheap, and easy. As I tell people in the medical field, think of a mask kind of like a hat. Most people like hats, except this is a hat for your mouth!”

——Grippo from Kissing Cadance, ibid.