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145-415: Coolness , or being cool , is the aesthetic quality of something (such as attitude , behavior, appearance, or style ) being generally admired by society. Because of the varied and changing interpretation of what is considered cool , as well as its subjective nature, the word has no single meaning. For most, coolness is associated with exemplifying composure and self-control . When used in conversation, it
290-550: A Time Asia article, "The Birth of Cool", author Hannah Beech describes Asian coolness as "a revolution in taste led by style gurus who are redefining Chinese craftsmanship in everything from architecture and film to clothing and cuisine" and as a modern aesthetic inspired both by Ming -era minimalism and a strenuous attention to detail. Paul Waley , professor of Human Geography at the University of Leeds, considers Tokyo , along with New York , London , and Paris , to be one of
435-413: A machine learning approach, where large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to "teach" a computer about what visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. A study by Y. Li and C. J. Hu employed Birkhoff's measurement in their statistical learning approach where order and complexity of an image determined aesthetic value. The image complexity was computed using information theory while
580-413: A subject -based, inductive approach. The analysis of individual experience and behaviour based on experimental methods is a central part of experimental aesthetics. In particular, the perception of works of art, music, sound, or modern items such as websites or other IT products is studied. Experimental aesthetics is strongly oriented towards the natural sciences . Modern approaches mostly come from
725-406: A work of art ), while artistic judgment refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art in general or a specific work of art . In the words of one philosopher, "Philosophy of art is about art. Aesthetics is about many things—including art. But it is also about our experience of breathtaking landscapes or the pattern of shadows on the wall opposite your office. Philosophers of art weigh
870-554: A Chinese military treatise written during the 6th century BC, general Sun Tzu , a member of the landless Chinese aristocracy, wrote in Chapter XII: Profiting by their panic, we shall exterminate them completely; this will cool the King's courage and cover us with glory, besides ensuring the success of our mission. Asian countries have developed a tradition on their own to explore types of modern "cool" or "ambiguous" aesthetics. In
1015-523: A Nobody , coolness is used as a criticism: "Upon my word, Gowing's coolness surpasses all belief." The key themes of modern European coolness were forged by avant-garde artists who achieved prominence in the aftermath of the First World War, most notably Dadaists , such as key Dada figures Arthur Cravan and Marcel Duchamp , and the left-wing milieu of the Weimar Republic . The goal of such groups
1160-411: A Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. "Rules of composition" that might be read into Duchamp 's Fountain or John Cage 's 4′33″ do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realization). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad:
1305-407: A confident manner. The grunge fashion style of the 1990s and 21st century allowed people who felt financially insecure about their lifestyle to pretend to "fit in" by wearing a unique piece of clothing, but one that was polished. For example, unlike the hippie style that clearly diverges from the norm, through Marc Jacobs ' combined "fashion-grunge" style of "a little preppie , a little grunge and
1450-428: A cultural and structural point of view, he argued in the structural sense that the dismantling of the welfare state in conjunction with the widening disparities between the rich and poor has served to further exclude disadvantaged groups. Because contemporary consumer capitalism places a greater than ever emphasis on conspicuous consumption and material success, this thus intensified feelings of deprivation experienced by
1595-423: A culturally contingent conception of art versus one that is purely theoretical. They study the varieties of art in relation to their physical, social, and cultural environments. Aesthetic philosophers sometimes also refer to psychological studies to help understand how people see, hear, imagine, think, learn, and act in relation to the materials and problems of art. Aesthetic psychology studies the creative process and
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#17330931678061740-449: A daily occurrence or a major event, and although many might cope effectively and not experience strain, there are those who cannot manage the strain. Psychological wellbeing may come into play here, as conditions like anxiety or depression may lower (or speak towards) a person’s difficulty coping. Examples include the loss of a loved one, sudden financial loss, bullying, and being fired. Being inexperienced in dealing with crises might increase
1885-621: A definition of cool from the Gola people of Liberia , who define it as the ability to be mentally calm or detached, in an otherworldly fashion, from one's circumstances, to be nonchalant in situations where emotionalism or eagerness would be natural and expected. Joseph M. Murphy writes that cool is also closely associated with the deity Òsun of the Yoruba religion . Thompson acknowledges similarities between African and European cool in shared notions of self-control and imperturbability. However, he finds
2030-470: A facsimile/copy). Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. What a thing means or symbolizes is often what is being judged. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point
2175-423: A few important ways: First, with economic gain as the most important goal, economic pressure becomes more obvious and promotes action. Second, the diminished value of social institutions, such as family and education, which would usually help to reduce crime rates and provide legitimate opportunities become far less effective. IAT also helps to explain the motivation for white-collar crime, while Merton does not. As
2320-404: A fundamental question that he posed as to why the rates of deviance were so different among different societies. Merton's theories of social structure and anomie sought to explain how a society's specific social structures can pressure certain members of society toward nonconformist or deviant behavior. He thought that there could be deviance in societies where the cultural definition of success and
2465-613: A general strain theory that is neither structural nor interpersonal but rather individual and emotional, paying special attention to an individual's immediate social environment. He argued that an individual's actual or anticipated failure to achieve positively valued goals, actual or anticipated removal of positively valued stimuli, and actual or anticipated presentation of negative stimuli all result in strain. Anger and frustration confirm negative relationships. The resulting behavior patterns will often be characterized by more than their share of unilateral action because an individual will have
2610-466: A group of researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. The tool predicted aesthetics based on the values of narrative elements. A relation between Max Bense 's mathematical formulation of aesthetics in terms of "redundancy" and "complexity" and theories of musical anticipation was offered using the notion of Information Rate. Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which
2755-594: A judgment about those sources of experience. It considers what happens in our minds when we engage with objects or environments such as viewing visual art, listening to music, reading poetry, experiencing a play, watching a fashion show, movie, sports or exploring various aspects of nature. The philosophy of art specifically studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people like some works of art and not others, as well as how art can affect our moods and our beliefs. Both aesthetics and
2900-406: A legitimate norm does not lead to perceptions of coolness. The level of autonomy considered appropriate is influenced by different variables for each individual. For example, people who think that societal institutions and authority are unjust or repressive equate coolness with higher levels of autonomy than those who are less critical of social norms and authority. According to this theory, coolness
3045-482: A little couture", he produces not only a bold statement, but one that is mysterious and awkward, creating an ambiguous perception of what the wearer's internal feelings are. While slang terms are usually short-lived coinages and figures of speech, cool is an especially ubiquitous slang word, most notably among young people. As well as being understood throughout the English-speaking world, the word has even entered
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#17330931678063190-484: A man "if he says that ' Canary wine is pleasant,' he is quite content if someone else corrects his expression and remind him that he ought to say instead: 'It is pleasant to me ,'" because "every one has his own [ sense of] taste ". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "pleasantness" because "if he gives out anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction—he judges not merely for himself, but for every one, and speaks of beauty as if it were
3335-450: A natural desire to avoid unpleasant rejections, and these unilateral actions (especially when antisocial) will further contribute to an individual's alienation from society. If particular rejections are generalized into feelings that the environment is unsupportive, more strongly negative emotions may motivate the individual to engage in crime. This is most likely to be true for younger individuals, and Agnew suggested that research focus on
3480-603: A new engine for economic growth and societal buoyancy. The term "gross national cool" was coined by journalist Douglas McGray. In a June/July 2002 article in Foreign Policy magazine, he argued that as Japan's economic juggernaut took a wrong turn into a 10-year slump , and with military power made impossible by a pacifist constitution, the nation had quietly emerged as a cultural powerhouse: "From pop music to consumer electronics , architecture to fashion, and food to art, Japan has far greater cultural influence now than it did in
3625-540: A particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art. Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari . Walter Benjamin echoed Malraux in believing aesthetics
3770-490: A person or brand) is autonomous ; that is, the person or brand is not constrained by the norms , expectations, or beliefs of others. Cool is also used for describing a general state of calmness and well-being, or similarly, a transcendent, internal state of peace and serenity. It can also refer to an absence of conflict, a state of harmony and balance, as in "the land is cool," or as in a "cool [spiritual] heart." Such meanings, according to Thompson, are African in origin. Cool
3915-613: A philosophical rationale for peace education . Beauty is one of the main subjects of aesthetics, together with art and taste . Many of its definitions include the idea that an object is beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aesthetic pleasure . Among the examples of beautiful objects are landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty is a positive aesthetic value that contrasts with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Different intuitions commonly associated with beauty and its nature are in conflict with each other, which poses certain difficulties for understanding it. On
4060-433: A physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory. Another problem is that Dutton's categories seek to universalize traditional European notions of aesthetics and art forgetting that, as André Malraux and others have pointed out, there have been large numbers of cultures in which such ideas (including the idea "art" itself) were non-existent. Aesthetic ethics refers to
4205-422: A piece of art. In this field, aesthetics is not considered to be dependent on taste but is a matter of cognition, and, consequently, learning. In 1928, the mathematician George David Birkhoff created an aesthetic measure M = O / C {\displaystyle M=O/C} as the ratio of order to complexity. In the 1960s and 1970s, Max Bense , Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake were among
4350-548: A property of things." Viewer interpretations of beauty may on occasion be observed to possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of an education process and awareness of elite cultural values learned through exposure to mass culture . Bourdieu examined how the elite in society define the aesthetic values like taste and how varying levels of exposure to these values can result in variations by class, cultural background, and education. According to Kant, beauty
4495-407: A result of their disengagement with the establishment, the scope of self-critique was limited because their "mask" filtered negative thoughts of worthlessness, fostering the opportunity for self-worth . Starting in the 1990s and continuing into the 21st century, the concept of dressing cool left the minority and entered the mainstream, making it a dominant ideology. Cool entered the mainstream as
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4640-544: A second-generation immigrant in the US who must abide by the ethnic rules of their family while also adapting to American culture at school and with peers. Another example can be found in developing countries where the values of traditional collectivism compete with modern individualism. "Aspirational strain" is the result of a discrepancy between an individual’s aspirations or goals, and the reality of their daily life that prevents them from achieving their aspirations. An example would be
4785-429: A student assaulting his peers to end the harassment they caused. GST introduces 3 main sources of strain or negative relationships such as: Institutional anomie theory (IAT) is a macro-level criminological theory developed in 1994 by Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld . Messner and Rosenfeld agree with Merton's view that American culture overemphasizes financial success, and expand on his view by arguing that
4930-466: A study on suicides in rural China: 1) value strain from differential values, 2) aspirational strain from the discrepancy between reality and aspiration, 3) deprivation strain from relative deprivation , including poverty, and 4) coping strain from not being able to cope in the face of crisis. The theory's particular strength is that, unlike many other theories on suicide, and strain, it does not restrict itself to one domain of possible risk factors; such as
5075-529: A stultifying official culture. Some clubs featured live jazz performances, and their smoky, sexually charged atmosphere carried a message for which the Puritanical values and monumental art of Marxist officialdom were an ideal foil. Arriving in Poland via France, America, and England, Polish coolness stimulated the film talents of a generation of artists, including Andrzej Wajda , Roman Polanski , and other graduates of
5220-727: A style of jazz called cool jazz appeared on the music scene, emphasizing a restrained, laid-back solo style. Notions of cool as an expression of inner self in a Taoist sense, equilibrium, self-possession, and an absence of conflict are commonly understood in African-American contexts well. Expressions such as "Don't blow your cool", or later, "chill out", and the use of "chill" as a general characterization of inner contentment or restful repose, all have their origins in African-American Vernacular English. As Ted Gioia wrote in A History of Cool Jazz in 100 Tracks : When
5365-483: A way to achieve respect. Designer Christian Lacroix has said that "the history of cool in America is the history of African-American culture ". Among black men in America, coolness, which may have its roots in slavery as an ironic submission and concealed subversion (as in an article by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein ), is enacted at times in order to create a powerful appearance, a type of performance frequently maintained for
5510-408: A work, though possibly of interest in themselves, have no bearing on the correct interpretation of the work." Gaut and Livingston define the intentionalists as distinct from formalists stating that: "Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works." They quote Richard Wollheim as stating that, "The task of criticism
5655-437: A young adult moving to a large city, expecting to become successful and live an affluent lifestyle, only to find that the means to achieve this might not be equally available due to their social status. The misleading notion of "work hard, play hard" may also cause aspirational strain, as a person might work two jobs but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle. The larger the discrepancy between aspiration and reality,
5800-403: Is a relative concept. In other words, cool exists only in comparison with things considered less cool. For example, in the book The Rebel Sell , cool is created out of a need for status and distinction. This creates a situation analogous to an arms race , in which cool is perpetuated by a collective action problem in society. Aesthetic Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics )
5945-591: Is a sociological theory developed in 1960 by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin . The theory states that crimes result from a high number of illegitimate opportunities and not from a lack of legitimate ones. The theory was created from Merton's strain theory to help address juvenile delinquency. The theory of " role strain ", developed by sociologist William J. Goode in 1960, states that social institutions are supported and operated by role relationships. Due to these role relationships that individuals may feel "role strain", or difficulty fulfilling their sociological duties in
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6090-417: Is a subjective, dynamic, socially-constructed trait, such that it is subjective. People perceive things (e.g., other people, products or brands) to be cool based on an inference of "autonomy". That is, something is perceived to be cool when it follows its own motivations. However, this theory proposes that the level of autonomy that leads to coolness is constrained. An inappropriate level of autonomy that opposes
6235-524: Is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo . Croce suggested that "expression"
6380-550: Is already made by Hume , but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics , 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behaviour, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory
6525-427: Is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society. Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting
6670-696: Is employed. A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. For instance, the source of a painting's beauty has a different character to that of beautiful music, suggesting their aesthetics differ in kind. The distinct inability of language to express aesthetic judgment and the role of social construction further cloud this issue. The philosopher Denis Dutton identified six universal signatures in human aesthetics: Artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn have indicated that there are too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, Hirschhorn's installations deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate
6815-768: Is enforced on everyone despite the fact that some people do not have the means to satisfy such high standards. Merton notes that crime and deviance are a "normal" response in a social structure that has adopted the high value goal of monetary success, but where opportunities for conventional or legitimate means of attaining success are blocked. For example, when wages are low, people may turn to illicit activities, such as prostitution, drug dealing, or gambling to achieve financial success. British Sociologist and Criminologist Jock Young drew on Merton's theory in his book The Exclusive Society: Social Exclusion, Crime and Difference in Late Modernity in 1999. Analysing crime from both
6960-442: Is for it to cause disinterested pleasure. Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude towards them or of their function. During the first half of the twentieth century, a significant shift to general aesthetic theory took place which attempted to apply aesthetic theory between various forms of art, including the literary arts and the visual arts, to each other. This resulted in
7105-410: Is more common in economically polarized societies where the rich and poor live geographically close to one another, although social media has also done much to create a sense of relative deprivation , especially amongst the youth. 'Coping strain' occurs when, in times of crisis, a person is not able to sufficiently cope, most commonly due to deficient or inappropriate coping methods. The crisis might be
7250-413: Is often as an expression of admiration or approval, and can be used when referencing both people and items of interest. Although commonly regarded as slang , cool is widely used among disparate social groups and has endured in usage for generations. There is no objective expression of coolness, as it varies wildly within cultures, ideologies, interests, and individuals. One consistent aspect, however,
7395-450: Is one of three pillars of a religious philosophy created in the 15th century by Yoruba and Igbo civilizations of West Africa. Cool , or Itutu , contained meanings of conciliation and gentleness of character, generosity, grace, and the ability to defuse fights and disputes. It was also associated with physical beauty. In Yoruba culture, Itutu is connected to water. This also gives it a connotation related to temperature. Thompson also cites
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#17330931678067540-511: Is related in this sense to both social control and transcendental balance. Cool can similarly be used to describe composure and an absence of excitement or agitation in a person, especially in times of stress (as expressed in the idiom keep one's cool ). The word can also express agreement or consent, as in the phrase, "I'm cool with that." The word cool may refer to an attitude or style widely adopted by artists or intellectuals, who aided its insertion into popular culture . This concept
7685-499: Is sometimes equated with truth. Recent research found that people use beauty as an indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks. However, scientists including the mathematician David Orrell and physicist Marcelo Gleiser have argued that the emphasis on aesthetic criteria such as symmetry is equally capable of leading scientists astray. Computational approaches to aesthetics emerged amid efforts to use computer science methods "to predict, convey, and evoke emotional response to
7830-422: Is subjective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone. In the opinion of Władysław Tatarkiewicz , there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression and innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a work of art. The question of whether there are facts about aesthetic judgments belongs to
7975-580: Is that being cool is widely seen as desirable. Although there is no single concept nor objective manifestation or expression of coolness, coolness as a trait can be considered from a few different angles. The sum and substance of coolness is a self-conscious confidence in overall behavior, which entails a set of specific behavioral characteristics that is firmly anchored in symbology , a set of discernible bodily movements , postures , facial expressions , and voice modulations that are acquired and take on strategic social value within certain contexts. Cool
8120-694: Is that the "mask" of coolness is worn not only in time of stress, but also of pleasure, in fields of expressive performance and the dance. Struck by the re-occurrence of this vital notion elsewhere in tropical Africa and in the Pan-American African Diaspora , I have come to term the attitude "an aesthetic of the cool" in the sense of a deeply and completely motivated, consciously artistic, interweaving of elements serious and pleasurable, of responsibility and play. Ronald Perry writes that many words and expressions have passed from African-American Vernacular English into Standard English slang, including
8265-455: Is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste and, in a broad sense, incorporates the philosophy of art . Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgments of artistic taste; thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature ". Aesthetics studies natural and artificial sources of experiences and how people form
8410-532: Is the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself." A large number of derivative forms of aesthetics have developed as contemporary and transitory forms of inquiry associated with the field of aesthetics which include the post-modern, psychoanalytic, scientific, and mathematical among others. Early-twentieth-century artists, poets and composers challenged existing notions of beauty, broadening
8555-483: Is usually defined as 'primitive' art, or un-harmonious, non-cathartic art, camp art, which 'beauty' posits and creates, dichotomously, as its opposite, without even the need of formal statements, but which will be 'perceived' as ugly. Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw
8700-435: Is what most people are inclined to do. Due to the fact that there is no force involved in maintaining these role relationships, there will be individuals who can not, or will not, conform to these societal expectations. In addition, the individuals within the society are not bound to one role relationship. In fact, all individuals will be part of multiple role relationships. Possession of multiple relationships can account for
8845-577: The American Dream ), even though they lack the means to do so. This leads to strain, which may lead individuals to commit crimes, like selling drugs or becoming involved in prostitution as a means to gain financial security. Strain could be: Robert King Merton was an American sociologist who argued that the social structure of a society can encourage deviance to a large degree. Merton's theory borrows from Èmile Durkheim's theory of anomie , which argues that industrialization would fundamentally alter
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#17330931678068990-604: The National Film School in Łódź , as well as the novelist Jerzy Kosinski , in whose clinical prose cool tends towards the sadistic. In Prague , the capital of Bohemia, cool flourished in the faded Art Deco splendor of the Café Slavia , which was part of the dissident underground called itself the "Jazz Section", following the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968. According to this theory, coolness
9135-513: The awe inspired by a sublime landscape might physically manifest with an increased heart-rate or pupil dilation. As seen, emotions are conformed to 'cultural' reactions, therefore aesthetics is always characterized by 'regional responses', as Francis Grose was the first to affirm in his Rules for Drawing Caricaturas: With an Essay on Comic Painting (1788), published in W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Bagster, London s.d. (1791? [1753]), pp. 1–24. Francis Grose can therefore be claimed to be
9280-412: The entropy , which assigns higher value to simpler artworks. In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty. This theory takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates that among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most aesthetically pleasing is the one that is encoded by the shortest description, following
9425-471: The "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect. Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty , Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing. The relation of Marxist aesthetics to post-modern aesthetics is still a contentious area of debate. The field of experimental aesthetics was founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th century. Experimental aesthetics in these times had been characterized by
9570-402: The "cool pose" as one of the factors in black underachievement. Robin D. G. Kelley criticizes calls for assimilation and sublimation of black culture, including the "cool pose". He argues that media and academics have unfairly demonized these aspects of black culture. At the same time, through their sustained fascination with blacks as "exotic" others, appropriated aspects of the "cool pose" into
9715-408: The "cool pose", as lower in achievement, higher in aggression, and more likely to need special education services than students with standard movement styles, irrespective of race or other academic indicators. The issue of stereotyping and discrimination with respect to the "cool pose" raises complex questions of assimilation and accommodation of different cultural values. Jason W. Osborne identifies
9860-399: The "full field" of aesthetics is broad, but in a narrow sense it can be limited to the theory of beauty, excluding the philosophy of art. Aesthetics typically considers questions of beauty as well as of art. It examines topics such as art works, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic experience refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily
10005-542: The 1960s to the 1990s by becoming integrated in the dominant fabric of fashion culture. America's mass production of "ready-to-wear" fashion in the 1940s and 1950s established specific conventional outfits as markers of one's unchanging social role in society. Subcultures such as hippies felt repressed by the dominating conservative and conformist ideology of the 1940s and 1950s and rebelled. According to Dick Pountain's definition of cool , hippies' fashionable dress can be seen as cool because of its prominent deviation from
10150-759: The 1980s, when it was an economic superpower." The notion of Asian "cool" applied to Asian consumer electronics is borrowed from the cultural media theorist Eric McLuhan , who described "cool" or "cold" media as stimulating participants to complete auditive or visual media content, in sharp contrast to "hot" media that degrades the viewer to a merely passive or non-interactive receiver. "Aristocratic cool," known as sprezzatura , has existed in Europe for centuries, particularly when relating to frank amorality or illicit pleasures behind closed doors; Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa are classic examples of sprezzatura . The sprezzatura of
10295-662: The British educated classes displayed a haughty indifference that displayed traces of an older aristocratic cool . What it meant to be "cool" resonated behind the Iron Curtain, where it offered relief from the earnestness of socialist propaganda and socialist realism in art. In the Polish industrial city Łódź , jazz, the "forbidden music", served Polish youth of the 1950s much as it had served its African-American creators, both as personal diversion and subterranean resistance to what they saw as
10440-684: The Mona Lisa is seen in both her smile and the positioning of her hands. Both the smile and hands are intended to convey her grandeur, self-confidence, and societal position. Literally translating to "disdain and detachment", sprezzatura is the art of refraining from the appearance of trying to present oneself in a particular way. In reality, of course, tremendous exertion went into pretending not to bother or care. English poet and playwright William Shakespeare used "cool" in several of his works to describe composure and absence of emotion. In A Midsummer Night's Dream , written around 1595 or 1596, he contrasts
10585-407: The aesthetic experience. Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds. Aesthetics examines affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgements of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume , delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all
10730-617: The aesthetic of coolness in Japan to samurai , but this is historically inaccurate. In fact, in many art forms including rakugo , samurai from the countryside were often depicted as the target of ridicule by the average commoner in the civilized Edo period. Some argue that the ethic of the samurai caste in Japan and warrior castes in India and East Asia all resemble what it means to be "cool". The samurai-themed works of film director Akira Kurosawa are among
10875-482: The air in the smoke-filled nightclubs of that era became unbreathable, windows and doors were opened to allow some 'cool air' in from the outside to help clear away the suffocating air. By analogy, the slow and smooth jazz style that was typical for that late-night scene came to be called "cool." He continued, "The goal [of cool jazz] was always the same: to lower the temperature of the music and bring out different qualities in jazz." Marlene Kim Connor connects cool and
11020-483: The already wealthy and powerful would not experience legitimate opportunity strain, IAT posits that success is open-ended. Even members who are already monetarily successful are driven by the constant pressure to acquire evermore money. Derived from Merton's Strain Theory, IAT expands on the macro levels of the theory. IAT's focus centers on the cultural goal of wealth as a determinant of crime. Illegitimate opportunities
11165-410: The artist. In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled " The Intentional Fallacy ", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention , or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside
11310-586: The basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success. One example being that humans are argued to find beautiful and prefer landscapes which were good habitats in the ancestral environment. Another example is that body symmetry and proportion are important aspects of physical attractiveness which may be due to this indicating good health during body growth. Evolutionary explanations for aesthetical preferences are important parts of evolutionary musicology , Darwinian literary studies , and
11455-580: The branch of metaphilosophy known as meta-aesthetics . Aesthetic judgment is closely tied to disgust . Responses like disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions including physiological responses like the gag reflex . Disgust is triggered largely by dissonance ; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in physical reactions. For example,
11600-620: The broader popular culture. George Elliott Clarke writes that Malcolm X , like Miles Davis , embodies essential elements of coolness. As an icon, Malcolm X inspires a complex mixture of both fear and fascination in broader American culture, much like the "cool pose" itself. Bongani Madando considers film icon Sidney Poitier as one who embodies coolness on-screen. In Japan, synonyms of cool could be iki and sui , referring to traditional aesthetic ideals among commoners that developed in Edo-period Japan. Some tend to immediately connect
11745-456: The closed doors and negative messages of the "generalized other". They also believe that attaining black manhood is filled with pitfalls of discrimination, negative self-image, guilt, shame, and fear. The "cool pose" may be a factor in discrimination in education, contributing to achievement gaps in test scores . In a 2004 study, researchers found that teachers perceived students with African-American culture-related movement styles, referred to as
11890-533: The conflicts of interest often faced in social settings. According to Goode, however, due to these multiple relationships, an individual will almost always have a total amount of role obligations that demand more than what the individual can give, whether it is in terms of time, emotional favor, or material resources. This can give rise to "role strain", which can lead the individual to attempting to fulfill socially acceptable goals in means that may not be socially acceptable (as explained in general strain theory). While
12035-452: The contemporary meaning of the word cool . The definition, meaning "something fashionable", is said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young . This predominantly black jazz scene in the U.S., as well as expatriate musicians in Paris , helped popularize notions of cool in the U.S. in the 1940s, giving birth to "Bohemian" or beatnik culture. Shortly thereafter,
12180-438: The cultural goal of success and restricted access to opportunities to institutionalized means for achieving success leads to deviance. Merton outlined five ways that individuals may respond to the strain between their cultural goals and the opportunities available to them. These are commonly referred to as Merton's typology of individual adaptation. Each type of individual adaptation is defined by its acceptance or rejection of
12325-401: The cultural goals (monetary success), and acceptance or rejection of the socially acceptable means to achieve the goal (e.g. high socioeconomic status, education, high-income job opportunities). In addition, Merton saw how minority groups had a harder time acquiring a good education, and if they could, they had a harder time acquiring a respectable living; yet the same high standard for success
12470-524: The cultural value of cool in Africa, which influenced the African diaspora , to be different from that held by Europeans, who use the term primarily as the ability to remain calm under stress. According to Thompson, there is significant weight, meaning, and spirituality attached to coolness in traditional African cultures, something which Thompson argues is absent from coolness in the Western context: The telling point
12615-634: The direction of previous approaches. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between that which is beautiful and that which is interesting , stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition, symmetry , and fractal self-similarity . Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images. Typically, these approaches follow
12760-560: The economy's supremacy over other social institutions and the cultural values of the American Dream create high crime rates. Messner and Rosenfeld argue that in American culture economic success is valued above everything else, which socializes Americans to value: These values are also necessary to perpetuate the cultural importance and value of economic gain. This imbalance between economy and all other social institutions affects society in
12905-499: The fact that individuals vary in their emotional commitment to these societal values, how these role relationships change when individuals go through a change in social position, or how these relationships hold up during times of crisis. In the year 1992, Robert Agnew asserted that strain theory could be central in explaining crime and deviance, but that it needed revision so that it was not tied to social class or cultural variables, but re-focused on norms. To this end, Agnew proposed
13050-630: The fields of cognitive psychology ( aesthetic cognitivism ) or neuroscience ( neuroaesthetics ). Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity , are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty . Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth , outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous, as reflected in
13195-489: The first critical 'aesthetic regionalist' in proclaiming the anti-universality of aesthetics in contrast to the perilous and always resurgent dictatorship of beauty. 'Aesthetic Regionalism' can thus be seen as a political statement and stance which vies against any universal notion of beauty to safeguard the counter-tradition of aesthetics related to what has been considered and dubbed un-beautiful just because one's culture does not contemplate it, e.g. Edmund Burke's sublime, what
13340-451: The first to analyze links between aesthetics, information processing , and information theory . Max Bense, for example, built on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure and proposed a similar information theoretic measure M a ¨ = R / H {\displaystyle M_{\ddot {a}}=R/H} , where R {\displaystyle R} is the redundancy and H {\displaystyle H}
13485-401: The formation of cognitive dissonance . Zhang proposes four types of strain that precede a suicide, each deriving from a particular source. These are: 'Value strain' is the result of two social values or beliefs that conflict and compete in a person’s daily life and internalised value system. The more equally important the two conflicting values, the greater the strain. An example Zhang gives is
13630-429: The forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama. Erich Auerbach has extended the discussion of history of aesthetics in his book titled Mimesis . Some writers distinguish aesthetics from the philosophy of art, claiming that the former is the study of beauty and taste while the latter is the study of works of art. Slater holds that
13775-480: The function of society; ultimately, causing a breakdown of social ties, social norms , and the social order. Merton believed that society's emphasis on certain socially accepted goals put pressure on people to conform in order to achieve success. His theory was developed largely due to the social and economic circumstances occurring in the United States during the early 1900s. Robert Merton's Strain Theory stems from
13920-456: The greater the strain. The notion of ‘if everyone is poor no one is’ might explain why in cases where a person of low socioeconomic standing is surrounded by those of similar standing, the strain is not as great (although the stress may very well be present). This contrasts with cases where the individual sees that those around them are much better off, causing them to feel deprived and miserable, resulting in deprivation strain. This type of strain
14065-434: The hippie rebels of the late 1960s became the senior executives of business sectors, such as the fashion industry. Since they grew up with cool and maintained the same values, they knew its rules and thus knew how to accurately market and produce such clothing. However, once cool became the dominant ideology in the 21st century, its definition changed to not one of rebellion but of one attempting to hide their insecurities in
14210-402: The idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive. John Dewey has pointed out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behaviour being "fair"—the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable. More recently, James Page has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form
14355-546: The ingredients in a composition", but also the sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." Thus, sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure . For Immanuel Kant ( Critique of Judgment , 1790), "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging reflective contemplation. Judgements of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once. Kant observed of
14500-442: The key principles of this theory is negative emotion as the motivator for crime. The theory was developed to conceptualize the full range of sources in society where strain possibly comes from, rather than Merton's focus on monetary goals and proper means. GST also focuses on the perspective of goals for status, expectations, and class. Examples of General Strain Theory are people who use illegal drugs to make themselves feel better, or
14645-487: The leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish , was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970). As summarized by Berys Gaut and Livingston in their essay "The Creation of Art": "Structuralist and post-structuralists theorists and critics were sharply critical of many aspects of New Criticism, beginning with the emphasis on aesthetic appreciation and
14790-575: The less successful. General strain theory (GST) is a sociological and criminological theory developed in 1992 by Robert Agnew . Agnew believed that Merton's theory was too vague in nature and did not account for criminal activity which did not involve financial gain. The core idea of general strain theory is that strain causes people to have negative emotional responses, negative emotions that people need to be able to cope with. Though, if people do not have access to legitimate or noncriminal coping, strain may lead them to commit crime in order to cope. One of
14935-828: The magnitude, recency, duration, and clustering of such strain-related events to determine whether a person copes with strain in a criminal or conforming manner. Temperament, intelligence, interpersonal skills, self-efficacy , the presence of conventional social support, and the absence of association with antisocial ( e.g. , criminally inclined) age and status peers are chief among the factors Agnew identified as beneficial. In recent years, Zhang and colleagues have argued that socio-psychological strain factors were more indicative than mental disorders in suicide ideation and risk. Zhang suggests that these mental strains, manifesting as an intense internal frustration and psychological suffering, develop from competing pressures in an individual's life, and identified four sources that precede suicide in
15080-456: The mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes." For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language. The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly,
15225-595: The most praised of the genre, influencing many filmmakers across the world with his techniques and storytelling. Notable works of his include Seven Samurai , Yojimbo , and The Hidden Fortress , the last being one of the primary inspirations for George Lucas 's Star Wars (which also borrows a number of aspects from the samurai, for example the Jedi Knights of the series). Samurai have been presented as cool in many modern Japanese movies such as Samurai Fiction , Kagemusha , and Yojimbo . In The Art of War ,
15370-596: The nonchalant, smooth-talking gangster who is an expert with a switchblade , personifies the bitter-sweet strain of cool; Puritanism and sentimentality are both anathema to the cool character. During the turbulent inter-war years, coolness was a privilege reserved for bohemian milieus like Brecht's. Cool irony and hedonism remained the province of cabaret artistes, ostentatious gangsters, and rich socialites. The luxuries depicted in Evelyn Waugh 's Brideshead Revisited and Christopher Isherwood 's Goodbye to Berlin traced
15515-416: The objective side of beauty by defining it in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole. Hedonist conceptions , on the other hand, focus more on the subjective side by drawing a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful
15660-448: The observer. One way to achieve this is to hold that an object is beautiful if it has the power to bring about certain aesthetic experiences in the perceiving subject. This is often combined with the view that the subject needs to have the ability to correctly perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as "sense of taste". Various conceptions of how to define and understand beauty have been suggested. Classical conceptions emphasize
15805-403: The one hand, beauty is ascribed to things as an objective, public feature. On the other hand, it seems to depend on the subjective, emotional response of the observer. It is said, for example, that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". It may be possible to reconcile these intuitions by affirming that it depends both on the objective features of the beautiful thing and the subjective response of
15950-456: The order was determined using fractal compression. There is also the case of the Acquine engine, developed at Penn State University , that rates natural photographs uploaded by users. There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess and music. Computational approaches have also been attempted in film making as demonstrated by a software model developed by Chitra Dorai and
16095-406: The outlines of a new cool. Peter Stearns , a professor of history at George Mason University , suggests that the seeds of a cool outlook had been sown among this inter-war generation. The Second World War brought the populations of Britain, Germany, and France into intimate contact with Americans and their culture. WWII also brought hundreds of thousands of GIs , whose relaxed, easy-going manner
16240-426: The perception of artwork; artworks presented in a classical museum context are liked more and rated more interesting than when presented in a sterile laboratory context. While specific results depend heavily on the style of the presented artwork, overall, the effect of context proved to be more important for the perception of artwork than the effect of genuineness (whether the artwork was being presented as original or as
16385-477: The philosophy of art as aesthetics covering the visual arts, the literary arts, the musical arts and other artists forms of expression can be dated back at least to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. Aristotle writing of the literary arts in his Poetics stated that epic poetry , tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry , painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts of mimesis , each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner. Aristotle applies
16530-523: The philosophy of art try to find answers to what exactly is art and what makes good art. The word aesthetic is derived from the Ancient Greek αἰσθητικός ( aisthētikós , "perceptive, sensitive, pertaining to sensory perception"), which in turn comes from αἰσθάνομαι ( aisthánomai , "I perceive, sense, learn") and is related to αἴσθησις ( aísthēsis , "perception, sensation"). Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start with
16675-456: The poem" ) in 1735; Baumgarten chose "aesthetics" because he wished to emphasize the experience of art as a means of knowing. Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics in the fragment Aesthetica (1750) is occasionally considered the first definition of modern aesthetics. The term was introduced into the English language by Thomas Carlyle in his Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825). The history of
16820-455: The post-war African-American experience in her book What is Cool?: Understanding Black Manhood in America . Connor writes that cool is the silent and knowing rejection of racist oppression, a self-dignified expression of masculinity developed by black men that were denied mainstream expressions of manhood. She writes that mainstream perception of cool is narrow and distorted, with coolness often perceived merely as style or arrogance rather than
16965-531: The proper means to achieve said goals are incongruent. He found that the United States is prime example of a society where increased levels of deviance relate to the high social value of achieving success, usually monetary, but there are contradictions to the proper means of achieving such success. Success is often valued more for its outcome than the means for achieving it, leading to a preference for convenient methods over traditional, ethical methods. Merton developed strain theory to explore how an extreme emphasis on
17110-407: The relationship. It is through this "role strain" that social action and social structure are maintained. With these relationships, come social obligations that members of that society are required to follow, which people are usually not forced to fulfill. In order for the society to continue existing, these obligations must be fulfilled at the volition of the individuals in it, which the theory states
17255-776: The research found that this was not the case. An example of these studies was a study done by Travis Hirschi in the 1969. He analyzes a large body of data on delinquency collected in Western Contra Costa County, California that contrast with strain theory. In addition to the study done by Hirschi, strain theory was explored in a 2001 study conducted by Jason D. Boardman (and others). The study explored how societal strain and stress can lead to drug use by individuals, in particular how one's neighborhood environment can affect their susceptibility to drug abuse. This study specifically centered around troubled neighborhoods in Detroit, and
17400-472: The results were based on census data taken of these neighborhoods, mainly because this data contained information on each individual resident's use of drugs. From this data, the study found that the more disadvantaged a neighborhood is, the more its residents abuse drugs. The study credited this positive trend to higher levels of stress and fewer available resources. According to strain theory, this lack of resources may compel an individual to abuse drugs to attain
17545-465: The rise of the New Criticism school and debate concerning the intentional fallacy . At issue was the question of whether the aesthetic intentions of the artist in creating the work of art, whatever its specific form, should be associated with the criticism and evaluation of the final product of the work of art, or, if the work of art should be evaluated on its own merits independent of the intentions of
17690-520: The role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture . Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty, κάλλος kallos ). André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to
17835-458: The sake of a social audience. Cool , though an amorphous quality—more mystique than material—is a pervasive element in urban black male culture. Majors and Billson address what they term the "cool pose" in their study and argue that it helps black men counter stress caused by social oppression, rejection and racism . They also contend that it furnishes the black male with a sense of control, strength, confidence and stability and helps him deal with
17980-530: The same sculptures as beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value. In a current context, a Lamborghini might be judged to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or it may be judged to be repulsive partly because it signifies over-consumption and offends political or moral values. The context of its presentation also affects
18125-439: The scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941, Eli Siegel , American philosopher and poet, founded Aesthetic Realism , the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Various attempts have been made to define Post-Modern Aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original,
18270-543: The series of articles on "The Pleasures of the Imagination", which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712. The term aesthetics was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (English: "Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining
18415-591: The shaping fantasies of lovers and madmen with "cool reason", in Hamlet he wrote "O gentle son, upon the heat and flame of thy distemper, sprinkle cool patience", and the antagonist Iago in Othello is musing about "reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts." The cool "Anatolian smile" of Turkey is used to mask emotions. A similar "mask" of coolness is worn in both times of stress and pleasure in American and African communities. In The Diary of
18560-400: The so-called autonomy of art, but they reiterated the attack on biographical criticisms' assumption that the artist's activities and experience were a privileged critical topic." These authors contend that: "Anti-intentionalists, such as formalists, hold that the intentions involved in the making of art are irrelevant or peripheral to correctly interpreting art. So details of the act of creating
18705-588: The social, psychiatric, or psychological. This strain theory of suicide developed from Durkheim's notion of anomie , and the work of Merton and Agnew on strain theory. Although mental illness on its own is not a definite risk factor for suicide to be considered a cause, their research suggests when it goes along with these strains, the risk is exponentially higher. On the other hand, the relationship between suicide and strain may also be moderated by social regulation, -integration, and psychological factors such as personality. Durkheim's anomie contributes to strain risk, so
18850-556: The standard uniformity and mass production of clothing created by the "totalitarian" system of fashion. Hippie-inspired fashion included various styles featuring bold colors, such as the "Trippy Hippie," the "Fantasy Hippie," the "Retro Hippie", the "Ethnic Hippie", and the "Craft Hippie". Additionally, according to strain theory , the hand production of hippie fashion made their clothing cool all on its own. Handmade clothing passively rebelled against consumerism by allowing hippies to reject that lifestyle, which in turn made them cool . As
18995-474: The statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem " Ode on a Grecian Urn " by John Keats , or by the Hindu motto "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" (Satya (Truth) is Shiva (God), and Shiva is Sundaram (Beautiful)). The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are influenced by processing fluency , which is the ease with which information can be processed, has been presented as an explanation for why beauty
19140-416: The strain theory on suicide agrees with the suggestion that a person well integrated into a social institution (family, religion, employment, school) may be at lower risk of suicide, even if confronted with a major strain, whereas a person without such integration might be more negatively affected. The Four Sources of Strain for Suicide A strain is made up of at least two pressures or variables, similar to
19285-401: The strain, which could be linked to the rates of suicide amongst teens and young adults. Strain theory has received several criticisms, such as: Strain theory was tested following its development. Most of these test examined ideal goals such as occupational goals and individual expectations, which would most ideally lead to crimes if not achieved under rule of strain theory. However, most of
19430-492: The study of the evolution of emotion . Strain theory (sociology) In the fields of sociology and criminology , strain theory is a theoretical perspective that aims to explain the relationship between social structure , social values or goals, and crime. Strain theory was originally introduced by Robert King Merton (1938), and argues that society's dominant cultural values and social structure causes strain, which may encourage citizens to commit crimes. Following on
19575-427: The term mimesis both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention and contends that the audience's realisation of the mimesis is vital to understanding the work itself. Aristotle states that mimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature". Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of
19720-430: The text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, " The Affective Fallacy ," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy", Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school of literary theory. One of
19865-409: The theory of role strain attempts to attribute the maintenance of society to role relationships, Goode also acknowledges that the theory does not account for the existence of more complex social settings, such as that of urban society. The theory of role strain does not account for several aspects of urban life, such as the fact that some individuals accept absolutely none of the society's central values,
20010-553: The vocabulary of several languages outside English, and several languages have their own words for the concept. In this sense, cool is used as a general positive epithet or interjection, which can have a range of related adjectival meanings . One of the essential characteristics of cool is its mutability—what is considered cool changes over time and varies among cultures and generations. Author Robert Farris Thompson , professor of art history at Yale University , suggests that Itutu , which he translates as "mystic coolness",
20155-498: The work of Émile Durkheim's theory of anomie , strain theory has been advanced by Robert King Merton (1938), Albert K. Cohen (1955), Richard Cloward , Lloyd Ohlin (1960), Neil Smelser (1963), Robert Agnew (1992), Steven Messner , Richard Rosenfeld (1994) and Jie Zhang (2012). Strain theory is a sociological and criminological theory developed in 1939 by Robert K. Merton . The theory states that society puts pressure on individuals to achieve socially accepted goals (such as
20300-476: The world's "capitals of cool", and The Washington Post 's Anthony Faiola called Tokyo "Japan's Empire of Cool" and Japan "the coolest nation on Earth": Analysts are marveling at the breadth of a recent explosion in cultural exports, and many argue that the international embrace of Japan's pop culture, film, food, style and arts is second only to that of the United States. Business leaders and government officials are now referring to Japan's 'gross national cool' as
20445-737: Was a comparatively recent invention, a view proven wrong in the late 1970s, when Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. Denis Dutton in "The Art Instinct" also proposed that an aesthetic sense was a vital evolutionary factor. Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime . Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism , "... will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain." Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via
20590-406: Was idealized by teenagers, became sought by product marketing firms, and has even been used as a shield against racial oppression or political persecution, seen by many as a source of constant cultural information. To many, being cool has become a global phenomenon. Concepts of coolness have existed for centuries in several cultures. In terms of fashion, the concept of cool has transformed from
20735-489: Was often self-consciously revolutionary, a determination to scandalize the bourgeoisie by mocking their culture, sexuality, and political moderation. Bertolt Brecht , both a committed Communist and a philandering cynic, stands as the archetype of this inter-war cool. Brecht projected his cool attitude to life onto his most famous character Macheath or "Mackie Messer" (Mack the knife) in The Threepenny Opera . Mackie,
20880-400: Was once an attitude fostered by rebels and underdogs —such as slaves, prisoners, bikers , political dissidents, etc.—for whom open rebellion invited punishment, so they hid defiance behind a wall of ironic detachment, distancing that defiance from the source of authority rather than directly confronting it. In general, coolness is a trait based on the inference that a cultural object (e.g.,
21025-432: Was seen by young people of the time as embodying liberation. To be cool or hip meant "hanging out", pursuing sexual liaisons, displaying a level of narcissistic self-absorption, and expressing a desire to escape all ideological causes. From the late 1940s onward, this popular culture influenced young people all over the world, to the dismay of the ruling paternalistic elites. The French intelligentsia were outraged, while
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