Showing titles in Aesthetics

Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence.

What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist’s final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for torture—in short, as an object we both do and do not recognize. Concluding with the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence—or if it is even ours to choose.

For as long as people have traveled to distant lands, they have brought home objects to certify the journey. More than mere merchandise, these travel souvenirs take on a personal and cultural meaning that goes beyond the object itself. Drawing on several millennia of examples—from the relic-driven quests of early Christians, to the mass-produced tchotchkes that line the shelves of a Disney gift shop—travel writer Rolf Potts delves into a complicated history that explores issues of authenticity, cultural obligation, market forces, human suffering, and self-presentation.

Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.

A deep dive into the joy and power of personal pleasures, quirks, obsessions and bad taste, from zine royalty, Ione Gamble. Most of us consider taste to be a primal instinct. We like the things we like and everything we choose to consume, covet or loathe in our day-to-day lives is dictated by...

A Roman Emperor. A battlefield journal. A timeless code of calm. Discover a full-bodied listening experience crafted to help you lead, persevere, and act with intention in a chaotic world. This bold, modern audiobook adaptation of Marcus Aurelius’ timeless reflections has been translated for raw philosophical clarity, voiced with power, and enriched with historical context. It is more than a new translation. It is a historical gateway into Marcus’ world, and your own civilizational legacy.

Art is a distinct entity. It has its own characteristic, its own function, its own role to play in society. It must be afforded the status and identity it rightly deserves in a world that is becoming ever more needful of its existence. “Art”, however, has increasingly become a catch-all term. Intended primarily for artists of all colours and flavours, as well as art appreciators, this audiobook aims to free up the thinking of the artist – or indeed anyone – by opening their eyes to many unexamined assumptions, and thereby questioning the validity of strongly-held views.

Le dernier opus de "Cosmos" explore les arts, la poésie et la musique : ces créations humaines qui s'allient à la nature pour permettre à chacun d'expérimenter le sublime. Des origines préhistoriques à la prédominance chrétienne, de l'art bourgeois de la Renaissance jusqu'aux créations contemporaines, Michel Onfray ébauche une contre-histoire des arts, citant Mallarmé, André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Bachelard, Georges Rouquier ou Pierre Soulages. L'art change de paradigme, et si la notion cardinale du beau disparaît, elle laisse la place au sublime, ce sentiment d'étonnement radical et subjugué qui peut réunir en un instant l'homme et le cosmos.

Qu'est-ce que l'art ? Comment s'est-il constitué et défini à travers l'histoire ? Quels rapports entretient-il avec la philosophie...

An informative, fun and rather charming essay on the nature and history of one of life’s most desirable assets, Charm, by renowned culture and design critic, Stephen Bayley. Aiming to wound, a schoolmaster wrote on future design-guru Stephen Bayley’s last ever school report “Charm alone...

Part ode to building something with one’s hands in the modern age, part celebration of the beauty and function of boats, and part moving father-daughter story, How to Build a Boat is a bold adventure. Once an essential skill, the ability to build a clinker boat, first innovated by the Vikings...

The ocean comprises the largest object on our planet. Retelling human history from an oceanic rather than terrestrial point of view unsettles our relationship with the natural environment. Our engagement with the world's oceans can be destructive, as with today's deluge of plastic trash and acidification, but the mismatch between small bodies and vast seas also emphasizes the frailty and resilience of human experience.

Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily lives has been comparatively gradual – so gradual, crucially, that it is easy to forget just how much we take it for granted. Every phone has a microphone. Every laptop has a microphone. We are surrounded by microphones. The microphone wields enormous power. But when we're 'on mic' we aren't just powerful, we're vulnerable. Microphones can destroy careers as quickly as make them. The microphone is inextricable from our need to be heard.

Why are there so many examples of public figures, entertainers, and normal, everyday people in blackface? And why aren’t there as many examples of people of color in whiteface? This book explains what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century. There is a filthy and vile thread—sometimes it’s tied into a noose—that connects the first performances of Blackness on English stages, the birth of blackface minstrelsy, contemporary performances of Blackness, and anti-Black racism.

Why Did That Happen? Aristotle Has Four Answers and None of Them Are Helpful is your brutally sarcastic, surprisingly educational crash course in Aristotelian philosophy—specifically his theory of causality, aka why things happen according to a man who thought everything, including acorns and chairs, had a spiritual destiny.

Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.

The art described in book is presented as the highest form of human resistance—not merely political or social, but existential. It is not just a reaction to power, injustice, or the suffocating grip of convention; it is a way of transcending them altogether. In its most authentic form, art carves out a territory that lies beyond the reach of censors, beyond the dictates of circumstance, beyond the reach of those who believe control is the same as order.

No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world.

A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver’s license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth’s pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom’s flipside: screening. The airport’s heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws...

Though we try to imagine otherwise, waste is every object, plus time. Whatever else an object is, it’s also waste—or was, or will be. All that is needed is time or a change of sentiment or circumstance. Waste is not merely the field of discarded objects, but the name we give to our troubled relationship with the decaying world outside ourselves. Waste focuses on those waste objects that most fundamentally shape our lives and also attempts to understand our complicated emotional and intellectual relationships to our own refuse.