This is the very nature of abstraction, and it is, after all, a fundamental aesthetic lesson of the 20th century that the abstract and the representational can gratify in equal measure, though not in the same way.
The show is meant to chart the course of marital negotiation, but at its heart it feels compelled to explore the ineptness of middle-class husbands to absorb the aesthetic and behavioral lessons of the upper classes.
The arts and humanities taught aesthetic, empathetic and timeless lessons — like the revelation that the dead and the living converse through philosophy, science, art, history, languages and literature: knowledge leads to wisdom.
The head of the art program was the German Bauhaus émigré Josef Albers, whose rigorous lessons in the aesthetic effects of combined materials and juxtaposed colors were imprinted on Rauschenberg, though to ends hardly orthodox.
Can aesthetic pleasures have ethical payoffs, imparting lessons for life?
When Ms. Buck-Morss turns her attention to cultural symmetries, it comes as a bit of relief -- even though she tends to view art in the Marxist manner, asserting that the aesthetic experience should teach a political lesson.
Moral, political, aesthetic.
It may also be the most important, if its lessons for contemporary art, both aesthetic and ethical, are properly absorbed.
When Lucia was fifteen, she began taking dance lessons, mostly of the new, anti-balletic, "aesthetic" variety, and this became her main interest during her teens and early twenties.
