“I feel sure learned aesthetics is rubbish, and that it ought to be a matter of literature and taste rather than science.“
-Bertrand Russell, some of the very few lines he ever wrote on aesthetics
Heinrich Runge approves of... Something.
In the past, I would have wholly agreed with the above Russell quote. I was more or less an avid subjectivist: what you liked was good. The more you liked it, the better. I have, more or less, abandoned this position in favour of another – quite like Russell did on almost all opinions he ever held, too. So, in light of Pontifus’ current excavations on what art is [->], I figured that it was a good time to write this post, which has flown around inside my skull like a crazed bat on speed for quite some time, but not had the confidence to write.
This will be a perhaps tad too personal post; I don’t like it more than you do, but such is the narrowness of my mind as to preclude any other way this post could have looked like. I’d suggest not reading it at all. And yes I namedropped Russell solely because comparing myself with him implicitly compares me with sheer genius.
