All posts tagged: Tasteful

Chase Infiniti on Her First Met Gala Look: “A Tasteful Nude”

Chase Infiniti on Her First Met Gala Look: “A Tasteful Nude”

“My hair is something that I take great pride in, and I love showcasing to the world the things that my curls can do,” she says. “It feels authentic to me, and hopefully it’s also something that people can connect to watching from home.” Infiniti says that Thom Browne has always been one of her dream brands, and recalls mentioning it to Bannerman and McDonald early on in their collaboration. “The fact that I get to wear it to my first Met feels too perfect,” she says. The coming together of her final look was a negotiation with her stylists and Browne between what she’s “comfortable with versus the boundaries I want to continue to push,” Infiniti says. One of her goals was to be bolder and more experimental, something Browne realized with this ensemble. “They are just the perfect brand to do that because of their insane amount of creativity,” she says. Photo: Menelik Puryear / Courtesy of Thom Browne Photo: Menelik Puryear / Courtesy of Thom Browne “I was excited to go with …

Rick Rubin, Kant, and the Tasteful Genius

Rick Rubin, Kant, and the Tasteful Genius

What does it mean to be a creative genius? The following clip is from a 2023 60 Minutes interview with legendary music producer Rick Rubin. In it, Rubin describes his creative process and provides an excellent occasion to discuss the relationship of genius and taste in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of art. In my Philosophy and the Arts course, we spend a significant amount of time reading Kant’s Critique of Judgment. I show this video on the day we discuss Kant’s theory of artistic genius. At this point, students are familiar with Kant’s account of taste, the ability to recognize and appreciate the aesthetic quality of beautiful art. In §46, Kant defines genius as “the inborn predisposition of the mind through which nature gives the rule to art” (5:307). Because beautiful art cannot be created according to fixed rules, the artistic genius is a kind of channel for the way beauty appears spontaneously in nature. (My slideshow includes Angelus Silesius’s “Die Rose” on this point: “The rose is without why.”) For Kant, genius has a talent …