The glow of grime Of course this 'sheen of antiquity' of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese the words denoting this glow describe a polish that comes of being touched over and over again, a sheen produced by the oils that naturally permeate an object over long years of handling—which is to say grime. If indeed 'elegance is frigid', it can as well be described as filthy. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows timeaestheticsfilthflaws
The core assertion Sitting there in the Whitney's coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. "That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it's beautiful," he commented, "that, as far as I'm concerned, now fits all my criteria for art." At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing. Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music beautyart