At the NYTimes, Lance Hosey on why we love beautiful things:

Great design, the management expert Gary Hamel once said, is like Justice Potter Stewart's famous definition of pornography -- you know it when you see it. You want it, too: brain scan studies reveal that the sight of an attractive product can trigger the part of the motor cerebellum that governs hand movement. Instinctively, we reach out for attractive things; beauty literally moves us.