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Practical/Aesthetics
What is art: skilled making as such, or only the production of beauty?
Art is imitation of imitation, thrice removed from truth, and dangerous when it substitutes for philosophy.
Art imitates nature, not by copying, but by completing what nature would do if it could.
Art reaches back to the Forms from which nature itself derives; the artist's vision is higher than its material copy.
Art's rightly-ordered beauty can lead the soul to God, or seduce it, when loved for itself.
Art is right reason in making: an intellectual virtue concerned with the goodness of the work, not the worker.
Fine art is the production of genius: nature giving the rule to art through an inexplicable gift.
Art is Spirit becoming sensuous, and its history is the history of Spirit's self-knowledge.
Art is the infection of feeling: good art unites people, bad art flatters and divides.
Art is sublimation: a socially acceptable substitute satisfaction for drives that civilization forces us to renounce.
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