In his novel Ulysses, James Joyce wrote: Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access . . . Joyce’s quote reminds me of something Herbert Marcuse once said about art: Art [functions to] break open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand [ Read more … ]
herbert marcuse
Notes on Art and Social Change
In the process of writing up some new course proposals, I discovered some old writing I’d never sent out. The ideas are still present for me, so I offer them to you. I think we can all feel it: the rumblings of change are happening all around us. Of course, change is part of life, [ Read more … ]
Getting Messy
One of my favorite art quotes is from Herbert Marcuse, a hard-to-read but brilliant philosopher. In The Aesthetic Dimension he writes, “Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in [ Read more … ]