Magic

Cherry Blossom Season

"Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort." Voltaire, 1752

"What philosophy of art needs is an approach that begins by treating art as a field of activities, objects, and experience that appears naturally in human life. We must first try to demarcate an uncontroversial center that gives more curious cases whatever interest they have. I regard this approach as "naturalistic," not in the sense that it is biologically driven (though biology is relevant to it), but because it depends on persistent cross-culturally identified patterns of behavior and discourse: the making, experiencing, and assessing of works of art. Many of the ways art is discussed and experienced can easily move across culture boundaries, and manage a global acceptance without help from academics or theorists. From Lascaux to Bollywood, artists, writers and musicians often have little trouble in achieving cross-cultural aesthetic understanding. The natural center on which such understanding exists is where theory must begin."

Dennis Dutton - The Art Instinct: Beauty Pleasure and Human Evolution