What is Aesthetic Realism? - Find out! - Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

I hope that, as you explore my website, you’ll want to learn more about the education of Aesthetic Realism, with its great understanding of the world, the arts, and the human self. Studying it has made my life rich and happy, and it can do this for every person.

A few ill-motivated people have used the web to lie about Aesthetic Realism. As we can see elsewhere in our time, lies can have power. But there is also what’s true, and it has even greater power. You can use your careful, critical mind to see past these lies, and find out about the logical, honest, thrilling education that is Aesthetic Realism.

Here are just some of the many websites through which you can learn more!

→Aesthetic Realism Foundation

→The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company

→Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, by Eli Siegel

→The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

→Aesthetic Realism Online Library

→Terrain Gallery in New York City:

Art Criticism—Discussions of many artists and works of art, including:

See the Current Exhibition — The Honoring Eye: 18 Photographers Look at the World
—with some of the beautiful, surprising, genuinely moving photographs of our time.

Eli Siegel explained:
“The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected; to use a specific object to see the meaning of the world with.”

→Periodical

Every two weeks, a new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known (TRO) is published. These issues include commentary by Chair of Education Ellen Reiss, lectures, essays, and poems by Eli Siegel, and papers by students of Aesthetic Realism from public seminars. The subjects that TRO deals with are wide-ranging, and include education; literature & poetry; the human self & mind, and the questions of men & women.

Here are some issues I’d like to call your attention to:

“Mind and the Two Kinds of Imagination” – about Aesthetic Realism’s understanding of the beautiful imagination that is on behalf of justice to the world, and the other kind, which comes from the desire to lessen, have contempt for the world, with a discussion of writing by William Cullen Bryant

“What Is Love About?” – containing the first part of Eli Siegel’s great lecture The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage“

What Value Is—in Art and Life” – containing the beginning of a 1970 lecture by Eli Siegel about the great English critic William Hazlitt

“Do You Want to Be Like Music?” – begins serialization of a 1975 class by Eli Siegel, in which he looks at his “Questions for Everyone” in relation to music

“The Art of Responding to Value” – with the first section of a thrilling lecture Criticism Is the Art of Responding to Value”

“How Aesthetic Realism Sees Art” – including a 1956 class about this subject

“For Our Time: Six Poems by Eli Siegel”

“The Self: Clever, Deep, & Confused”

“Art & Your Life: The Same Subject”

“Music or Depression?”

Further links:

Poems by Eli Siegel. Here are some that I love: “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” “Quiet, Tears, Babies,” “Hell, What Is This About, Asked Again,” “The Lord Has Stolen Her Whims,” “Any Star and Shakey, “Eagles Go with the Fine News to Many Places.”

Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World: Writiten by Eli Siegel in 1945, this work is at once philosophic in the deepest and truest sense, and vitally practical and useful for every person. Mr. Siegel defines and comments on words that stand for the biggest matters in the world and in people’s lives: for instance, Desire, Knowledge, History, Success, Kindness, Hope, Freedom, and more.

Friends of Aesthetic Realism: Countering the Lies

El Realismo Estético: a Spanish-language website about Aesthetic Realism

The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company