Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

Is aesthetics only about art that is beautiful as conventionally understood? If not, what purpose does art that may not be so serve? My new essay published in May 2022 in Blue Labyrinths        Image: John Constable, Hadleigh Castle (1837) (Public Domain)

 It is a commonplace to claim that art imitates life. If so, art, in performing this mimesis, should respond also to our obsession and concern with temporality (time as experienced, not as measured, or human time as opposed to what the metaphysicians claim). How does art participate in this alchemy of smelting clock time into felt time? Read essay at Blue Labyrinths .

My essay Aesthetic ineffability and the rebirth of the reader  was published in May 2020 on  Aesthetics Research Lab ,  a "digital think tank and resource, revolving around theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" conceived by Michael Spicher, PhD.  Here is the  link . This essay examine the idea that literature is as capable of giving rise to an experience of aesthetic ineffability as the other arts. Furthermore, the ineffable experience in literature may be a product of both the author and the reader, and that there is similarly a need for a confluence between the artist and viewer in other art forms too for ineffability to arise.

My essay Vivaldi for Gorillas: Seeking Aesthetics in Adversity was published in March 2020 on  Aesthetics Research Lab ,  a "digital think tank and resource, revolving around theoretical and practical issues in aesthetics" conceived by Michael Spicher, PhD.  Here is the link . In this essay, I discuss this question: Why does someone reach for beauty in circumstances of adversity when it is usually presumed that staying alive presupposes all else? Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) / Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)