The Connection Between Art and Sex

How the pleasure in some stately piece of beautifully pro- portioned architecture, the thrill produced by solemn music, or the calm sweetness of a summer landscape in the evening, is to be attributed to the feeling of sex only, it is hard to see; they have in common a pleasurable emotion, and that is all. That a very large part of art is directly inspired by erotic motives is perfectly true, and that various forms of art play an important part in love songs and courtship is obvious; but this is so because beauty produced by art has in itself the power of arousing emotion, and is therefore naturally made use of to heighten the total pleasure. That love has provided the opportunity and incentive to innumerable works of art, that it has added to the pleasure and enjoyment of countless beauties, need not be denied; but we cannot admit that it is due to the sex feeling that rhythm, symmetry, harmony, and beautiful colour are capable of giving us a pleasurable feeling.

Notes:

Both instill pleasurable emotions, but is one a strategy to get the other or are they naturally connected via the similar emotions they generate?

Folksonomies: art sex humanities

Taxonomies:
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/art and entertainment/music (0.105131)

Keywords:
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Concepts:
Aesthetics (0.947058): dbpedia | freebase
Feeling (0.919485): dbpedia | freebase
Emotion (0.819167): dbpedia | freebase
Love (0.744691): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Sexual arousal (0.601408): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Concepts in aesthetics (0.597663): dbpedia
Pleasure P (0.587504): dbpedia | freebase
Beauty (0.586169): dbpedia | freebase

 The Origin of the Sense of Beauty
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Clay, Felix (1908), The Origin of the Sense of Beauty, Retrieved on 2013-07-18
  • Source Material [books.google.com]
  • Folksonomies: philosophy