The Creative Life News Might Focus on Anything!

Why Focus on What's Disgusting

It's true that these columns are free to focus on whatever is interesting to creative life. This month, the focus is on the "disgusting". Sounds awful, no?

So why do it? Like most of us, most of the time, I prefer the attractive to the repellant in art and in life. But have you also noticed that our curiosity seeks opposites? Sometimes we're drawn to (hopefully manageable) doses of the repellant, horrible, and even dangerous. Some of us more than others, for sure, and that's a matter of experience and personal preference.

Art today (as in other historical-cultural moments) has a penchant for celebrating the distasteful, darker, non-beautiful , perhaps ugly and distorted aspects of contemporary life. this

Disgust is Relative

What is commonly called disgusting is relative. Like the idea of " ugly", it's worth considering. as much art throughout history has done. Not only the beautiful or tasteful merit our attention. Art and human inquiry explore all aspects of experience and expression.

Disgust Merits a Museum!

The disgusting now even merit its own museum. One of the first, located in Malmö, Sweden it challenges the concept of taste quite literally and dramatically by having us eat smelly foods we presume to be disgusting. For instance....

Is a Skunk Disgusting?

A portrait I did some time ago gently relates to the idea of tadisgusting aversions (skunk smell) and becoming an acquired taste.

Read more about this and how it relates to art and creative-life in a soon-to-come column, "That's Disgusting."