Article written by Bruno Passos

In Praise of Shadows

Author: Junichiro Tanizaki

A brief and precious essay on Aesthetics, which provokes us to reflect on what would be the characteristics that make something beautiful. Does beauty need dirt? Darkness? Aging? The answer to these questions may be very different from what we think.

Tanizaki adds here an oriental point of view on beauty, generating freshness and challenging the current, aseptic, clean and artificial beauty that we often use in the West.

“This doesn’t mean that we dislike all brightness, but rather than the superficial and sparkling we prefer the deep and dark.”