Informant38

"I suppose at the root of all this is the feeling that possibly the only way that humans can remain cooperative is by those of us who are artists or who are interested in the arts realizing that we have some kind of a job to do. It's no good any more as far as I'm concerned for artists to just take the Bohemian attitude of, oh, it just comes out of me, and I don't know what I'm doing, etc. I just can't stand that, I don't want this romantic attitude that says artists shouldn't be part of this planet. This is a real job, and it has to do something
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Color theories, and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautiful and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn't like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It's the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: no, it's us. It's us who make those meanings."

Brian Eno, at the Edge

{the golden mean as culturally arbitrary value-added meme? the golden meme?

it's easier for me to imagine a fundamentally unambiguous nature. to everything, in everything. that it's that we respond to most. that the golden mean is a capturing of that. though I admit it's not hard to see the biology in color harmony, the mammalian urge in landscape grandeur, still it's plain that there's something going on here we can't articulate, can't even grasp the possibility of except as extrapolative potential, something deep and eternal and as real as dental plaque, or sex, or galaxies.}