It's difficult to overstate Beard's far-reaching influence: He pioneered food TV with the first-ever network cooking series in 1946; he authored nearly two dozen books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles on gastronomy; through it all, his work inspired home cooks to no longer see food as mere sustenance but as a delightful, indulgent form of entertainment.
It's difficult to overstate Beard's far-reaching influence: He pioneered food TV with the first-ever network cooking series in 1946; he authoured nearly two dozen books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles on gastronomy; through it all, his work inspired home cooks to no longer see food as mere sustenance but as a delightful, indulgent form of entertainment.
Unsatisfied with the widespread criticism of authenticity as an adequate ethical orientation, Taylor sets out to prove that authenticity does not necessarily lead to aestheticism or self-indulgence: the justified criticism of self-indulgent forms of the ideal does not justify the complete condemnation of the ideal itself (Taylor 1991: 56).
But in pure evolutionary terms, even the pretentious, over-the-top, foolishly self-indulgent forms of haute macho beat butting heads.
Editors place great emphasis on the design of their publications, and the columns they write about redesigns are among the most boring and self-indulgent forms of journalism.
In the last three decades, authors like Taylor (1989, 1991, 1995, 2007), Ferrara (1993 19988), Jacob Golomb (1995), Guignon (2004, 2008) and Varga (2011a) have attempted to reconstruct authenticity by maintaining that the justified criticism of self-indulgent forms of the idea does not justify the total condemnation of the idea itself (see Taylor 1991: 56).
But there are also dead spots, even in the recent work, prominent among them an indulgent free-form documentary about the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, pretentiously narrated by Derek Jacobi and full of overwrought music.
He offers a refreshingly idiosyncratic approach to a rather self-indulgent art form, avoiding many of the harmonic and technical cliches beloved of virtuoso guitarists.
Regard it as a prog-rock album in comics form — indulgent, bombastic, technically astounding — and its morose grandeur becomes kind of thrilling.
Sussman's defense of sluts feels dated (its superb evocation of adolescent makeout sessions notwithstanding); Daphne Merkin's reflections on the penis, while canny in form, are indulgent in content.
There are those who will never respond to Gehry's work — who feel that his intensely romantic, emotional forms are self-indulgent — and those people are missing an architectural experience of immense power and subtlety.
