“What Is Art For?”
“Aesthetic Realism sees the purpose of art as, from the beginning, the liking of the world more….It is well to look at an American history of world art to ascertain whether art puts into action the deepest desire of man, with that desire being to like the world….”
“The Opposites Theory”
The Opposites Theory is a work Eli Siegel wrote in the late 1950s. It is a discussion, scholarly and vivid, of the explanation of beauty on which Aesthetic Realism is based—the principle that “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
- Art as the Oneness of Opposites: An Outline of the Theory
- Comment on the Opposites in Art
- The Theory of Opposites in Art; and Diderot
- Tightness & Diffusion, or, Maybe, Finite & Infinite, in Art
- The Necessary & the Casual in Prose
- Ugliness & Beauty in Oneness
- Spontaneity & Contrivance as One
- Art as Simultaneous Heaviness & Lightness
- Animate & Inanimate in Reality & Art
- Slowness & Speed; or, Ariadne & Bacchus in Art
- There-It-Is; or, The Immediate & Permanent in Art
- The Graceful Effort; or, The Oneness of Ease & Difficulty in Art
- Being as Exaggeration; or, Repose & Energy in Art