What are some good works on the philosophy of Beauty?Two big topics that immediately come to mind are the beauty of the passing of things and the beauty of greatness. The former is often imbodied in the japanese mono no aware of the western Ruinenlust. While the later is often studied in the concepts of the sublime or romanticism. In some ways Mono no aware is the feeling of understanding a universal truth and being content with it (whether that is substantiated or not), while the sublime is the feeling of not being able to understand the magnitude of the universe completely and standing in awe of it(again regardless of the truth of this claim).Personally to me mono no aware feels a bit too passive for my liking, while philosophies of the sublime feel too manic and overwhelming. I am more of the disposition of noticing something that might have greater resonance, but its actual magnitude in uncertain to our limited observation. Something wistful that pulls you to not just enjoy the moment, but tries to get you to dig a little further proactively, but not promising anything outright. I think a lot of the works of Caspar David Friedrich get at my particular tastes.
>>25557997>Caspar David Friedrichisn't that the guy who made all those spooky gothic paintings
>>25558012Yes. Though I personally find them spookily beautyful.
>>25557997I have some stuff by Dietrich Von Hildebrand but he rarely gets mentioned here.
>>25557997Plotinus - On Beauty. It's short and sweet.
>>25558216>>25558258Thanks I will have to check it out. read plotinus years ago, but I dont think it was one on beauty.One general school of thought I have been interested in and will have to explore is Sehnsucht, meaning "yearning sickness" or something like that.
Dave Hickey had a fairly influential series of art history essays that were published in the 90s (I think) titled "The Invisible Dragon." They are mostly about an issue in art between looking good and meaning something, and what has happened to art in a post-Warhol era where what something means has become much more important than how it looks. Normally a series of art history essays would be completely ignored but they expressed a lot of the anxiety that working artists and a subset of academics had about the art world at the time and were pretty well read. Maybe saying they were influential is too much, but they're close to that.
