Aesthetics (also spelledesthetics) is the branch ofphilosophy concerned with the nature ofbeauty andtaste, which in a broad sense incorporates thephilosophy of art.[1] Aesthetics examines values about, andcritical judgments of, artistic taste and preference.[2] It thus studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people consider certain things beautiful and not others, as well as how objects of beauty and art can affect our moods and our beliefs.[3]
Aesthetics tries to find answers to what exactly is art and what makes good art. It considers what happens in our minds when we view visual art, listen to music, read poetry, enjoy delicious food, and engage in large artistic projects like creating and experiencing plays, fashion shows, films, and television programs. It can also focus on how humans regard various forms of beauty in the natural world. Its function is the "critical reflection on art, culture andnature".[4][5]
The wordaesthetic is derived from theAncient Greekαἰσθητικός (aisthētikós, "perceptive, sensitive, pertaining to sensory perception"), which in turn comes fromαἰσθάνομαι (aisthánomai, "I perceive, sense, learn") and is related toαἴσθησις (aísthēsis, "perception, sensation").[6] Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start with the series of articles on "The Pleasures of the Imagination", which the journalistJoseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazineThe Spectator in 1712.[1]
The termaesthetics wasappropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopherAlexander Baumgarten in his dissertationMeditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (English:"Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining the poem") in 1735;[7] Baumgarten chose "aesthetics" because he wished to emphasize the experience of art as a means of knowing. Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics in the fragmentAesthetica (1750) is occasionally considered the first definition of modern aesthetics.[8]
The term was introduced into the English language byThomas Carlyle in hisLife of Friedrich Schiller (1825).[9]
The history of the philosophy of art as aesthetics covering the visual arts, the literary arts, the musical arts and other artists forms of expression can be dated back at least to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. Aristotle writing of the literary arts in hisPoetics stated thatepic poetry, tragedy, comedy,dithyrambic poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts ofmimesis, each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner.[10][11] Aristotle applies the termmimesis both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention[10] and contends that the audience's realisation of themimesis is vital to understanding the work itself.[10]
Aristotle states thatmimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals[10][12] and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature".[10] Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of the mimetic arts possesses whatStephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes."[13] For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language.
The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama.[14]
A man enjoying a painting of a landscape. The nature of such experience is studied by aesthetics.
Some writers distinguish aesthetics from the philosophy of art, claiming that the former is the study of beauty and taste while the latter is the study of works of art. Slater holds that the "full field" of aesthetics is broad, but in a narrow sense it can be limited to the theory of beauty, excluding the philosophy of art.[1] Aesthetics typically considers questions of beauty as well as of art. It examines topics such as art works, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic judgment.[15]
Aesthetic experience refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily awork of art), while artistic judgment refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art in general or a specificwork of art. In the words of one philosopher, "Philosophy of art is about art. Aesthetics is about many things—including art. But it is also about our experience of breathtaking landscapes or the pattern of shadows on the wall opposite your office.[16]
Philosophers of art weigh a culturally contingent conception of art versus one that is purely theoretical. They study the varieties of art in relation to their physical, social, and cultural environments. Aesthetic philosophers sometimes also refer to psychological studies to help understand how people see, hear, imagine, think, learn, and act in relation to the materials and problems of art. Aesthetic psychology studies the creative process and the aesthetic experience.[17]
Immanuel Kant believed that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment.
Aesthetics examinesaffective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgements of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However,aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination.
ForDavid Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also the sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind."[20] Thus, sensory discrimination is linked to capacity forpleasure.
ForImmanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, butjudging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging reflective contemplation. Judgements of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once. Kant observed of a man "if he says that 'Canary wine is pleasant,' he is quite content if someone else corrects his expression and remind him that he ought to say instead: 'It is pleasantto me,'" because "every one has his own [sense of]taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "pleasantness" because "if he gives out anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction—he judges not merely for himself, but for every one, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things."[21]
Viewer interpretations of beauty may on occasion be observed to possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of an education process and awareness of elite cultural values learned through exposure tomass culture. Bourdieu examined how the elite in society define the aesthetic values like taste and how varying levels of exposure to these values can result in variations by class, cultural background, and education.[22] According to Kant, beauty is subjective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone.[23] In the opinion ofWładysław Tatarkiewicz, there are six conditions for the presentation of art: beauty, form, representation, reproduction of reality, artistic expression and innovation. However, one may not be able to pin down these qualities in a work of art.[24]
The question of whether there arefacts about aesthetic judgments belongs to the branch ofmetaphilosophy known asmeta-aesthetics.[25]
Aesthetic judgment is closely tied todisgust.[citation needed] Responses like disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways tofacial expressions including physiological responses like thegag reflex. Disgust is triggered largely bydissonance; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in physical reactions. For example, theawe inspired by asublime landscape might physically manifest with an increased heart-rate or pupil dilation.
As seen, emotions are conformed to 'cultural' reactions, therefore aesthetics is always characterized by 'regional responses', as Francis Grose was the first to affirm in hisRules for Drawing Caricaturas: With an Essay on Comic Painting (1788), published in W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, Bagster, London s.d. (1791? [1753]), pp. 1–24. Francis Grose can therefore be claimed to be the first critical 'aesthetic regionalist' in proclaiming the anti-universality of aesthetics in contrast to the perilous and always resurgent dictatorship of beauty.[26] 'Aesthetic Regionalism' can thus be seen as a political statement and stance which vies against any universal notion of beauty to safeguard the counter-tradition of aesthetics related to what has been considered and dubbed un-beautiful just because one's culture does not contemplate it, e.g. Edmund Burke's sublime, what is usually defined as 'primitive' art, or un-harmonious, non-cathartic art, camp art, which 'beauty' posits and creates, dichotomously, as its opposite, without even the need of formal statements, but which will be 'perceived' as ugly.[27]
Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent.Victorians in Britain often sawAfrican sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later,Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even tosexual desirability. Thus, judgments ofaesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, ormoral value.[28] In a current context, aLamborghini might be judged to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as a status symbol, or it may be judged to be repulsive partly because it signifies over-consumption and offends political or moral values.[29]
The context of its presentation also affects the perception of artwork; artworks presented in a classical museum context are liked more and rated more interesting than when presented in a sterile laboratory context. While specific results depend heavily on the style of the presented artwork, overall, the effect of context proved to be more important for the perception of artwork than the effect of genuineness (whether the artwork was being presented as original or as a facsimile/copy).[30]
Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. What a thing means or symbolizes is often what is being judged. Modern aestheticians have asserted thatwill anddesire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yetpreference andchoice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point is already made byHume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", inThe Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behaviour, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory is employed.[citation needed]
A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. For instance, the source of a painting's beauty has a different character to that of beautiful music, suggesting their aesthetics differ in kind.[31] The distinct inability of language to express aesthetic judgment and the role ofsocial construction further cloud this issue.
The philosopherDenis Dutton identified six universal signatures in human aesthetics:[32]
Expertise or virtuosity. Humans cultivate, recognize, and admire technical artistic skills.
Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and do not demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
Imitation. With a few important exceptions like abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
Artists such asThomas Hirschhorn have indicated that there are too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, Hirschhorn's installations deliberately eschew technical virtuosity. People can appreciate a RenaissanceMadonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. "Rules of composition" that might be read intoDuchamp'sFountain orJohn Cage's4′33″ do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realization). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad: a physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his/her imagination in the course of formulating a theory. Another problem is that Dutton's categories seek to universalize traditional European notions of aesthetics and art forgetting that, as André Malraux and others have pointed out, there have been large numbers of cultures in which such ideas (including the idea "art" itself) were non-existent.[33]
Aesthetic ethics refers to the idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive.John Dewey[34] has pointed out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behaviour being "fair"—the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable. More recently,James Page[35] has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form a philosophical rationale forpeace education.
Beauty is one of the main subjects of aesthetics, together withart andtaste.[36][37] Many of its definitions include the idea that an object is beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aestheticpleasure. Among the examples of beautiful objects are landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty is a positive aesthetic value that contrasts withugliness as its negative counterpart.[38]
Different intuitions commonly associated with beauty and its nature are in conflict with each other, which poses certain difficulties for understanding it.[39][40][41] On the one hand, beauty is ascribed to things as an objective, public feature. On the other hand, it seems to depend on the subjective, emotional response of the observer. It is said, for example, that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".[42][36] It may be possible to reconcile these intuitions by affirming that it depends both on the objective features of the beautiful thing and the subjective response of the observer. One way to achieve this is to hold that an object is beautiful if it has the power to bring about certain aesthetic experiences in the perceiving subject. This is often combined with the view that the subject needs to have the ability to correctly perceive and judge beauty, sometimes referred to as "sense of taste".[36][40][41] Various conceptions of how to define and understand beauty have been suggested.Classical conceptions emphasize the objective side of beauty by defining it in terms of the relation between the beautiful object as a whole and its parts: the parts should stand in the right proportion to each other and thus compose an integrated harmonious whole.[36][38][41]Hedonist conceptions, on the other hand, focus more on the subjective side by drawing a necessary connection between pleasure and beauty, e.g. that for an object to be beautiful is for it to cause disinterested pleasure.[43] Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude towards them or of their function.[44][38][36]
During the first half of the twentieth century, a significant shift to general aesthetic theory took place which attempted to apply aesthetic theory between various forms of art, including the literary arts and the visual arts, to each other. This resulted in the rise of theNew Criticism school and debate concerningthe intentional fallacy. At issue was the question of whether the aesthetic intentions of the artist in creating the work of art, whatever its specific form, should be associated with the criticism and evaluation of the final product of the work of art, or, if the work of art should be evaluated on its own merits independent of the intentions of the artist.[citation needed]
In 1946,William K. Wimsatt andMonroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of anauthor's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.[citation needed]
In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy", Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from thereader-response school of literary theory. One of the leading theorists from this school,Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970).[45]
As summarized byBerys Gaut and Livingston in their essay "The Creation of Art": "Structuralist and post-structuralists theorists and critics were sharply critical of many aspects of New Criticism, beginning with the emphasis on aesthetic appreciation and the so-called autonomy of art, but they reiterated the attack on biographical criticisms' assumption that the artist's activities and experience were a privileged critical topic."[46] These authors contend that: "Anti-intentionalists, such as formalists, hold that the intentions involved in the making of art are irrelevant or peripheral to correctly interpreting art. So details of the act of creating a work, though possibly of interest in themselves, have no bearing on the correct interpretation of the work."[47]
Gaut and Livingston define the intentionalists as distinct fromformalists stating that: "Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works." They quoteRichard Wollheim as stating that, "The task of criticism is the reconstruction of the creative process, where the creative process must in turn be thought of as something not stopping short of, but terminating on, the work of art itself."[47]
A large number of derivative forms of aesthetics have developed as contemporary and transitory forms of inquiry associated with the field of aesthetics which include the post-modern, psychoanalytic, scientific, and mathematical among others.[citation needed]
Early-twentieth-century artists, poets and composers challenged existing notions of beauty, broadening the scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941,Eli Siegel, American philosopher and poet, foundedAesthetic Realism, the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."[48][49]
Various attempts have been made to definePost-Modern Aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and theRococo.
Croce suggested that "expression" is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central.George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities.[50]Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society.[51]Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience.Hal Foster attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art inThe Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture.Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty, κάλλοςkallos).[52]André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art.[53]Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy ofDeleuze andGuattari.[54] Walter Benjamin echoed Malraux in believing aesthetics was a comparatively recent invention, a view proven wrong in the late 1970s, when Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory.Denis Dutton in "The Art Instinct" also proposed that an aesthetic sense was a vital evolutionary factor.
Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction betweentaste and thesublime. Sublime painting, unlikekitschrealism, "... will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."[55][56]
Mathematical considerations, such assymmetry andcomplexity, are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations ofapplied aesthetics used in the study ofmathematical beauty. Aesthetic considerations such assymmetry andsimplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such asethics andtheoretical physics andcosmology todefinetruth, outside ofempirical considerations. Beauty andTruth have been argued to be nearly synonymous,[65] as reflected in the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" byJohn Keats, or by the Hindu motto "Satyam Shivam Sundaram" (Satya (Truth) is Shiva (God), and Shiva is Sundaram (Beautiful)). The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are influenced byprocessing fluency, which is the ease with which information can be processed, has been presented as an explanation for why beauty is sometimes equated with truth.[66] Recent research found that people use beauty as an indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks.[67] However, scientists including the mathematicianDavid Orrell[68] and physicistMarcelo Gleiser[69] have argued that the emphasis on aesthetic criteria such as symmetry is equally capable of leading scientists astray.
Computational approaches to aesthetics emerged amid efforts to use computer science methods "to predict, convey, and evoke emotional response to a piece of art.[70] In this field, aesthetics is not considered to be dependent on taste but is a matter of cognition, and, consequently, learning.[71] In 1928, the mathematicianGeorge David Birkhoff created an aesthetic measure as the ratio of order to complexity.[72]
In the 1990s,Jürgen Schmidhuber described analgorithmic theory of beauty. This theory takes thesubjectivity of the observer into account and postulates that among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most aesthetically pleasing is the one that is encoded by the shortest description, following the direction of previous approaches.[76][77] Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between that which isbeautiful and that which isinteresting, stating that interestingness corresponds to thefirst derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve thepredictability andcompressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition,symmetry, andfractalself-similarity.[78][79][80][81]
Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images.[82][83][84][85] Typically, these approaches follow amachine learning approach, where large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to "teach" a computer about what visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. A study by Y. Li and C. J. Hu employed Birkhoff's measurement in their statistical learning approach where order and complexity of an image determined aesthetic value.[86] The image complexity was computed using information theory while the order was determined using fractal compression.[86] There is also the case of the Acquine engine, developed atPenn State University, that rates natural photographs uploaded by users.[87]
There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess[further explanation needed] and music.[88] Computational approaches have also been attempted in film making as demonstrated by a software model developed by Chitra Dorai and a group of researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.[89] The tool predicted aesthetics based on the values of narrative elements.[89] A relation betweenMax Bense's mathematical formulation of aesthetics in terms of "redundancy" and "complexity" and theories of musical anticipation was offered using the notion of Information Rate.[90]
Evolutionary aesthetics refers toevolutionary psychology theories in which the basic aesthetic preferences ofHomo sapiens are argued to haveevolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success.[91] One example being that humans are argued to find beautiful and preferlandscapes which were goodhabitats in the ancestral environment. Another example is that body symmetry and proportion are important aspects ofphysical attractiveness which may be due to this indicating good health during body growth. Evolutionary explanations for aesthetical preferences are important parts ofevolutionary musicology,Darwinian literary studies, and the study of theevolution of emotion.
As well as being applied to art, aesthetics can also be applied to cultural objects, such as crosses or tools. For example, aesthetic coupling between art-objects and medical topics was made by speakers working for theUS Information Agency. Art slides were linked to slides of pharmacological data, which improved attention and retention by simultaneous activation of intuitive right brain with rational left.[92] It can also be used in topics as diverse ascartography,mathematics,gastronomy,fashion and website design.[93][94][95][96][97]
Guy Sircello has pioneered efforts inanalytic philosophy to develop a rigorous theory of aesthetics, focusing on the concepts of beauty,[98] love[99] and sublimity.[100] In contrast to romantic theorists, Sircello argued for the objectivity of beauty and formulated a theory of love on that basis.
British philosopher and theorist ofconceptual art aesthetics,Peter Osborne, makes the point that "'post-conceptual art' aesthetic does not concern a particular type ofcontemporary art so much as the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general ...".[101] Osborne noted that contemporary art is 'post-conceptual' in a public lecture delivered in 2010.
Gary Tedman has put forward a theory of a subjectless aesthetics derived fromKarl Marx's concept of alienation, andLouis Althusser's antihumanism, using elements of Freud's group psychology, defining a concept of the 'aesthetic level of practice'.[102]
Gregory Loewen has suggested that the subject is key in the interaction with the aesthetic object. The work of art serves as a vehicle for the projection of the individual's identity into the world of objects, as well as being the irruptive source of much of what is uncanny in modern life. As well, art is used to memorialize individuated biographies in a manner that allows persons to imagine that they are part of something greater than themselves.[103]
The philosophy of aesthetics as a practice has been criticized by some sociologists and writers of art and society.Raymond Williams, for example, argues that there is no unique and or individual aesthetic object which can be extrapolated from the art world, but rather that there is a continuum of cultural forms and experience of which ordinary speech and experiences may signal as art. By "art" we may frame several artistic "works" or "creations" as so though this reference remains within the institution or special event which creates it and this leaves some works or other possible "art" outside of the frame work, or other interpretations such as other phenomenon which may not be considered as "art".[104]
Pierre Bourdieu disagrees with Kant's idea of the "aesthetic". He argues that Kant's "aesthetic" merely represents an experience that is the product of an elevated class habitus and scholarly leisure as opposed to other possible and equally valid "aesthetic" experiences which lay outside Kant's narrow definition.[105]
Timothy Laurie argues that theories of musical aesthetics "framed entirely in terms of appreciation, contemplation or reflection risk idealizing an implausibly unmotivated listener defined solely through musical objects, rather than seeing them as a person for whom complex intentions and motivations produce variable attractions to cultural objects and practices".[106]
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