About

     A Dilettante is owned and managed by Joseph A. Hazani. At the start of 2013, Mr. Hazani began a project: to watch a Netflix film six days every week followed by writing a critique the day after. Within several months, his ability to articulate his cinematic impressions flourished, laying the groundwork for beginning his Apple podcast “A Dilettante TV & Film Review”. He has since reviewed over 150 works of film and television. His reviews permitted him to examine the age-old question: what is art?

     Conjointly with answering this question was his first critical film anthology Critique of the Last Man in Film self-published in 2015. This work examines a common theme in dozens of the films he had reviewed: the concept of Frederick Nietzsche’s “Last Man”. Critique offered Mr. Hazani a way to ground his artistic criticism via the proper articulation of his art theory, while also contemplating a philosophical concept that was ripe for visual demonstration during an ardent nihilistic period of Western Civilization.

     Subsequently, the mediocrity of contemporary film moved Mr. Hazani out into society to voraciously test his critical abilities, but also more importantly, to test his art theory. A Dilettante is the periodical of these examinations of contemporary culture. It provides support for his justified belief that the best art is the most universal and timeless; that these works have a shard of prophetic revelation imbued within them, to bring forward within humanity not simply a new way of thinking, but a new way of being.

     Art, Mr. Hazani believes, is fundamentally evolutionarily biological and as essential to civilization’s progress as the act of combustion is to a locomotive engine. By setting one’s sights upon good art, Mr. Hazani believes one is not merely becoming cultured, i.e. acquiring proper taste, but becoming a more proper human being; one that is pacific, creative, and above all else, happy. Happiness brings with it a celebration for tasting life which is a positive current that flows outward through good thoughts. When this current is compounded in society, the restless animal spirit of humanity necessarily liberates itself from its wild passions and moves toward turning swords into plowshares, elevating civilization to otherwise unreachable bounds with lesser spiritual cultivation.

     It is this positivity which explains Nietzsche’s pronouncement: “Art is the proper task in life.”

     Mr. Hazani was born in Mountain View, CA and raised in Sunnyvale, CA. He was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine in 2008 and completed coursework towards his Master’s of Science in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California before withdrawing to enter into LED lighting manufacturing in 2011. In 2017 he co-founded TopGrow Lighting, an LED horticultural lighting startup based in Los Angeles, focused on manufacturing LED lamps for cultivating cannabis indoors. 

     While he has no formal fine arts education aside from Western Art History collegiate curriculum, his passion, instigated from learning the history of the Italian Renaissance as an adolescent, and persisting through summer courses at De Anza College in high school, has allowed him comfort in situating contemporary fine art within the Western cultural tradition. Mr. Hazani affirms, “There is a sacredness to Western Fine Art which is unmistakable and logically connected to The Church and its facsimile of Ancient Greek culture, a culture historically treated as par excellence in the Occident. Part of the adventure in art criticism is discovering art which possesses this spiritual heredity yet is also courageously expressive in its attempts at striking at immortality.”

     In his leisure, Mr. Hazani enjoys playing basketball & golf, creatively writing short stories, composing philosophical and cultural essays, and writing about himself in the third person . At present, he is working on The Ownership of Freedom, which is a mathematically rigorous synthesis of the time-evolution of biological cellular replication towards human conscious experience and its political defense, introducing a new scientific paradigm of political economy through the application of digital signal processing theory used in our everyday digital communication. His theory has already been published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. He is preparing to submit his research to his alma matter – UC Irvine – when complete.