Aesthetics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste; and functions as the philosophy of art.[1] Aesthetics examines the philosophy of aesthetic value, which is determined by critical judgements of artistic taste;[2] thus, the function of aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".[3][4]

Aesthetics studies natural and artificial sources of experiences and how people form a judgement about those sources of experience. It considers what happens in our minds when we engage with objects or environments such as viewing visual art, listening to music, reading poetry, experiencing a play, watching a fashion show, movie, sports or exploring various aspects of nature.

The philosophy of art specifically studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people like some works of art and not others, as well as how art can affect our moods and our beliefs.[5] Both aesthetics and the philosophy of art try to find answers to what exactly is art and what makes good art.

Etymology[edit]

The word aesthetic is derived from the Ancient Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthētikós, "perceptive, sensitive, pertaining to sensory perception"), which in turn comes from αἰσθάνομαι (aisthánomai, "I perceive, sense, learn") and is related to αἴσθησις (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 journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712.[7]

The term aesthetics was appropriated and coined with new meaning by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in his dissertation Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (English: "Philosophical considerations of some matters pertaining the poem") in 1735;[8] Baumgarten chose "aesthetics" because he wished to emphasize the experience of art as a means of knowing. Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics in the fragment Aesthetica (1750) is occasionally considered the first definition of modern aesthetics.[9]

The term was introduced into the English language by Thomas Carlyle in his Life of Friedrich Schiller (1825).[10]

History of aesthetics[edit]

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 his Poetics stated that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance are all fundamentally acts of mimesis, each varying in imitation by medium, object, and manner.[11][12] Aristotle applies the term mimesis both as a property of a work of art and also as the product of the artist's intention[11] and contends that the audience's realisation of the mimesis is vital to understanding the work itself.[11]

Aristotle states that mimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals[11][13] and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature".[11] Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of the mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes."[14] 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.[15] Erich Auerbach has extended the discussion of history of aesthetics in his book titled Mimesis.

Aesthetics and the philosophy of art[edit]

A man admiring a painting
A man enjoying a painting of a landscape. The nature of such experience is studied by aesthetics.

Some 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. But aesthetics typically considers questions of beauty as well as of art. It examines topics such as art works, aesthetic experience, and aesthetic judgement.[16]

Aesthetic experience refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily a work of art), while artistic judgement refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art in general or a specific work 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.[17]

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.[18]

Aesthetic judgement, universals, and ethics[edit]

Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.

Aesthetic judgement[edit]

Aesthetics examines affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Judgements of aesthetic value rely on the ability to discriminate at a sensory level. However, aesthetic judgements usually go beyond sensory discrimination.

For David 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."[21] Thus, sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure.

For Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging 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 pleasant to 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."[22]

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 to mass 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.[23] According to Kant, beauty is subjective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone.[24] In the opinion of Władysław 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.[25]

The question of whether there are facts about aesthetic judgments belongs to the branch of metaphilosophy known as meta-aesthetics.[26]

Factors involved in aesthetic judgement[edit]

Rainbows often have aesthetic appeal.

Aesthetic judgement is closely tied to disgust.[citation needed] Responses like disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions including physiological responses like the gag reflex. Disgust is triggered largely by dissonance; 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 judgements may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in physical reactions. For example, the awe inspired by a sublime 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 his Rules 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.[27] '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.[28]

Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African 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 to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value.[29] In a current context, a Lamborghini 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.[30]

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).[31]

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 that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th-century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic's Judgment", in The 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.[32] The distinct inability of language to express aesthetic judgment and the role of social construction further cloud this issue.

Aesthetic universals[edit]

The philosopher Denis Dutton identified six universal signatures in human aesthetics:[33]

  1. Expertise or virtuosity. Humans cultivate, recognize, and admire technical artistic skills.
  2. Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and do not demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
  3. Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
  4. Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
  5. Imitation. With a few important exceptions like abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
  6. Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.

Artists such as Thomas 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 Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions. "Rules of composition" that might be read into Duchamp's Fountain or John Cage's 4′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.[34]

Aesthetic ethics[edit]

Aesthetic ethics refers to the idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive. John Dewey[35] 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[36] has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form a philosophical rationale for peace education.

Beauty[edit]

Beauty is one of the main subjects of aesthetics, together with art and taste.[37][38] Many of its definitions include the idea that an object is beautiful if perceiving it is accompanied by aesthetic pleasure. Among the examples of beautiful objects are landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty is a positive aesthetic value that contrasts with ugliness as its negative counterpart.[39]

Different intuitions commonly associated with beauty and its nature are in conflict with each other, which poses certain difficulties for understanding it.[40][41][42] 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".[43][37] 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".[37][41][42] 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.[37][39][42] 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.[44] Other conceptions include defining beautiful objects in terms of their value, of a loving attitude towards them or of their function.[45][39][37]

New Criticism and "The Intentional Fallacy"[edit]

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 the New Criticism school and debate concerning the 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 and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author'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 the reader-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).[46]

As summarized by Berys 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."[47] 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."[48]

Gaut and Livingston define the intentionalists as distinct from formalists stating that: "Intentionalists, unlike formalists, hold that reference to intentions is essential in fixing the correct interpretation of works." They quote Richard 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."[48]

Derivative forms of aesthetics[edit]

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]

Post-modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis[edit]

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, founded Aesthetic 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."[49][50]

Various attempts have been made to define Post-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 the Rococo.

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.[51] Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society.[52] 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 in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty, κάλλος kallos).[53] 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.[54] Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.[55] 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 between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "... will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."[56][57]

Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.[58] Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty,[59] Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing.[60]

The relation of Marxist aesthetics to post-modern aesthetics is still a contentious area of debate.

Aesthetics and science[edit]

The field of experimental aesthetics was founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th century. Experimental aesthetics in these times had been characterized by a subject-based, inductive approach. The analysis of individual experience and behaviour based on experimental methods is a central part of experimental aesthetics. In particular, the perception of works of art,[61] music, or modern items such as websites[62] or other IT products[63] is studied. Experimental aesthetics is strongly oriented towards the natural sciences. Modern approaches mostly come from the fields of cognitive psychology (aesthetic cognitivism) or neuroscience (neuroaesthetics[64]).

Truth in beauty and mathematics[edit]

Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity, are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth 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" by John 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 by processing 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 mathematician David Orrell[68] and physicist Marcelo Gleiser[69] have argued that the emphasis on aesthetic criteria such as symmetry is equally capable of leading scientists astray.

Computational approaches[edit]

The Mandelbrot set with continuously colored environment

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] It this field, aesthetics is not considered to be dependent on taste but is a matter of cognition, and, consequently, learning.[71] In 1928, the mathematician George David Birkhoff created an aesthetic measure as the ratio of order to complexity.[72]

In the 1960s and 1970s, Max Bense, Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake were among the first to analyze links between aesthetics, information processing, and information theory.[73][74][75] Max Bense, for example, built on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure and proposed a similar information theoretic measure , where is the redundancy and the entropy, which assigns higher value to simpler artworks.

In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic theory of beauty. This theory takes the subjectivity 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 is beautiful and that which is interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition, symmetry, and fractal self-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 a machine 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 at Penn 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 between Max 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[edit]

Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success.[91] One example being that humans are argued to find beautiful and prefer landscapes which were good habitats in the ancestral environment. Another example is that body symmetry and proportion are important aspects of physical attractiveness which may be due to this indicating good health during body growth. Evolutionary explanations for aesthetical preferences are important parts of evolutionary musicology, Darwinian literary studies, and the study of the evolution of emotion.

Applied aesthetics[edit]

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 the US Information Agency.[92] Art slides were linked to slides of pharmacological data, which improved attention and retention by 'simultaneous activation of intuitive right brain with rational left'[citation needed]. It can also be used in topics as diverse as cartography, mathematics, gastronomy, fashion and website design.[93][94][95][96][97]

Other approaches[edit]

Guy Sircello has pioneered efforts in analytic 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 of conceptual art aesthetics, Peter Osborne, makes the point that "'post-conceptual art' aesthetic does not concern a particular type of contemporary 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 from Karl Marx's concept of alienation, and Louis 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]

Criticism[edit]

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]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Aesthetics Archived 31 March 2023 at the Wayback Machine", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Barry Hartley Slater. Retrieved 28-02-2021.
  2. ^ Zangwill, Nick. "Aesthetic Judgment Archived 2 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008.
  3. ^ Kelly (1998) p. ix
  4. ^ Riedel, Tom (Fall 1999). "Review of Encyclopedia of Aesthetics 4 vol. Michael Kelly". Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America. 18 (2): 48. doi:10.1086/adx.18.2.27949030.
  5. ^ Thomas Munro, "Aesthetics", The World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, ed. A. Richard Harmet, et al., (Chicago: Merchandise Mart Plaza, 1986), p. 80
  6. ^ Harper, Douglas. "aesthetic". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  7. ^ Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 28 December 2018. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
  8. ^ Guyer, Paul (2005). Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521606691.
  9. ^ Wilson, N (2013). Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. Routledge. p. 20. ISBN 978-1136788000..
  10. ^ ap Roberts, Ruth (1991). "Carlyle and the Aesthetic Movement". Carlyle Annual (12): 58. ISSN 1050-3099. JSTOR 44945538. Archived from the original on 20 October 2022. Retrieved 3 February 2023.
  11. ^ a b c d e Halliwell 2002, pp. 152–159.
  12. ^ Poetics, p. I 1447a.
  13. ^ Poetics, p. IV.
  14. ^ Halliwell 2002, pp. 152–59.
  15. ^ Poetics, p. III.
  16. ^ Shelley, James (2017), "The Concept of the Aesthetic", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, archived from the original on 8 March 2021, retrieved 9 December 2018
  17. ^ Nanay, Bence. (2019) Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. p.4
  18. ^ Thomas Munro, "aesthetics", The World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, ed. A. Richard Harmet, et al., (Chicago: Merchandise Mart Plaza, 1986), p. 81.
  19. ^ Barnett Newman Foundation, Chronology, 1952 Archived 8 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 30 August 2010
  20. ^ The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, By Arthur Coleman Danto, p. 1, Published by Open Court Publishing, 2003, ISBN 978-0812695403
  21. ^ David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, Literary, Indianapolis: Literary Fund, 1987.
  22. ^ Kant, Immanuel (1790). "§ 7. Comparison of the Beautiful with the Pleasant and the Good by means of the above characteristic". Critique of Judgement. Translated by Bernard, J. H. (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan and Co. (published 1914). pp. 57–8. ISBN 9781508892281.
  23. ^ Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction. Routledge. ISBN 0674212770
  24. ^ Zangwill, Nick (26 August 2014). "Aesthetic Judgment". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  25. ^ Tatarkiewicz, Władysław (1980). A History of Six Ideas: an essay in aesthetics. PWN/Polish Scientific Publishers. ISBN 978-8301008246.
  26. ^ Hanson, Louise (21 August 2014). Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780199747108.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-974710-8 – via www.oxfordreference.com.
  27. ^ Bezrucka, Yvonne (2017). The Invention of Northern Aesthetics in 18th-Century English Literature. Archived from the original on 4 September 2019. Retrieved 4 September 2019.
  28. ^ Bezrucka, Yvonne (2008). "The Well Beloved: Thomas Hardy's Manifesto of 'Regional Aesthetics'". Victorian Literature and Culture. 36: 227–245. doi:10.1017/S1060150308080133. S2CID 170093813.
  29. ^ Holm, Ivar (2006). Ideas and Beliefs in Architecture and Industrial design: How attitudes, orientations, and underlying assumptions shape the built environment. Oslo School of Architecture and Design. ISBN 8254701741.
  30. ^ Korsmeyer, Carolyn, ed. (1998). Aesthetics: The Big Questions. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631205944.
  31. ^ Susanne Grüner; Eva Specker & Helmut Leder (2019). "Effects of Context and Genuineness in the Experience of Art". Empirical Studies of the Arts. 37 (2): 138–152. doi:10.1177/0276237418822896. S2CID 150115587. Archived from the original on 24 January 2020. Retrieved 5 December 2019.
  32. ^ Consider Clement Greenberg's arguments in "On Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of Arts.
  33. ^ Denis Dutton's Aesthetic Universals summarized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate
  34. ^ Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux's Theory of Art. (Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2009)
  35. ^ Dewey, John; James Tufts (1932). "Ethics". In Jo-Ann Boydston (ed.). The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953. Carbonsdale: Southern Illinois University Press. p. 275.
  36. ^
  37. ^ a b c d e Sartwell, Crispin (2017). "Beauty". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Archived from the original on 26 February 2022. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  38. ^ "Aesthetics". Encyclopedia Britannica. Archived from the original on 28 February 2022. Retrieved 9 February 2021.
  39. ^ a b c "Beauty and Ugliness". www.encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on 24 December 2021. Retrieved 9 February 2021.
  40. ^ Honderich, Ted (2005). "Aesthetic judgment". The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 29 January 2021. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  41. ^ a b Zangwill, Nick (2003). "Beauty". In Levinson, Jerrold (ed.). Oxford Handbook to Aesthetics. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199279456.003.0018. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  42. ^ a b c De Clercq, Rafael (2013). "Beauty". The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Routledge. Archived from the original on 13 January 2022. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  43. ^ Gary Martin (2007). "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". The Phrase Finder. Archived from the original on 30 November 2007. Retrieved 4 December 2007.
  44. ^ Gorodeisky, Keren (2019). "On Liking Aesthetic Value". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 102 (2): 261–280. doi:10.1111/phpr.12641. ISSN 1933-1592. S2CID 204522523. Archived from the original on 8 October 2021. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  45. ^ Craig, Edward (1996). "Beauty". Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge. Archived from the original on 16 January 2021. Retrieved 26 May 2021.
  46. ^ Leitch, Vincent B., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
  47. ^ Gaut, Berys; Livingston, Paisley (2003). The Creation of Art. Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0521812344.
  48. ^ a b Gaut and Livingston, p. 6.
  49. ^ Green, Edward (2005). "Donald Francis Tovey, Aesthetic Realism and the Need for a Philosophic Musicology". International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music. 36 (2): 227–248. JSTOR 30032170.
  50. ^ Siegel, Eli (1955). "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 14 (2): 282–283. JSTOR 425879.
  51. ^ King, Alexandra. "The Aesthetic Attitude". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  52. ^ Grosswiler, Paul (2010). Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical, and Postmodern Perspectives. Peter Lang Publishing. p. 13. ISBN 978-1433110672. Retrieved 10 March 2015.
  53. ^ Danto, Arthur C. (2004). "Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art". Art Journal. 63 (2): 24–35. doi:10.2307/4134518. JSTOR 4134518.
  54. ^ Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, André Malraux's Theory of Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)
  55. ^ Massumi, Brian, (ed.), A Shock to Thought. Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London & NY: Routeledge, 2002. ISBN 0415238048
  56. ^ Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, What is Postmodernism?, in The Postmodern Condition, Minnesota and Manchester, 1984.
  57. ^ Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, "Scriptures: Diffracted Traces", in Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.
  58. ^ Freud, Sigmund, "The Uncanny" (1919). Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, 17:234–236. London: The Hogarth Press
  59. ^ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964), The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0810104571
  60. ^ Lacan, Jacques, "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII), NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.
  61. ^ Kobbert, M. (1986), Kunstpsychologie ("Psychology of art"), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt
  62. ^ Thielsch, M.T. (2008), Ästhetik von Websites. Wahrnehmung von Ästhetik und deren Beziehung zu Inhalt, Usability und Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen. ("The aesthetics of websites. Perception of aesthetics and its relation to content, usability, and personality traits."), MV Wissenschaft, Münster
  63. ^ Hassenzahl, M. (2008), Aesthetics in interactive products: Correlates and consequences of beauty. In H.N.J. Schifferstein & P. Hekkert (Eds.): Product Experience. (pp. 287–302). Elsevier, Amsterdam
  64. ^ Martindale, C (2007). "Recent trends in the psychological study of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts". Empirical Studies of the Arts. 25 (2): 121–141. doi:10.2190/b637-1041-2635-16nn. S2CID 143506308.
  65. ^ Why Beauty Is Truth: The History of Symmetry, Ian Stewart, 2008
  66. ^ Reber, R; Schwarz, N; Winkielman, P (2004). "Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the perceiver's processing experience?". Personality and Social Psychology Review. 8 (4): 364–382. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0804_3. hdl:1956/594. PMID 15582859. S2CID 1868463.
  67. ^ Reber, R; Brun, M; Mitterndorfer, K (2008). "The use of heuristics in intuitive mathematical judgment". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 15 (6): 1174–1178. doi:10.3758/pbr.15.6.1174. hdl:1956/2734. PMID 19001586. S2CID 5297500.
  68. ^ Orrell, David (2012). Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0300186611.
  69. ^ Gleiser, Marcelo (2010). A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe. Free Press. ISBN 978-1439108321.
  70. ^ Petrosino, Alfredo (2013). Progress in Image Analysis and Processing, ICIAP 2013: Naples, Italy, September 9–13, 2013, Proceedings. Heidelberg: Springer. p. 21. ISBN 978-3642411830.
  71. ^ Jahanian, Ali (2016). Quantifying Aesthetics of Visual Design Applied to Automatic Design. Cham: Springer. pp. 11–12. ISBN 978-3319314853.
  72. ^ Akiba, Fuminori (2013). "Preface: Natural Computing and Computational Aesthetics". Natural Computing and Beyond. Proceedings in Information and Communications Technology. 6: 117–118. doi:10.1007/978-4-431-54394-7_10. ISBN 978-4431543930.
  73. ^ Bense, Max (1969). Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung in der Texttheorie. Rohwolt.
  74. ^ A. Moles: Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique, Paris, Denoël, 1973 (Information Theory and aesthetical perception)
  75. ^ F Nake (1974). Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung. (Aesthetics as information processing). Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik. Springer, 1974, ISBN 978-3211812167
  76. ^ Schmidhuber, Jürgen (22 October 1997). "Low-Complexity Art". Leonardo. 30 (2): 97–103. doi:10.2307/1576418. JSTOR 1576418. PMID 22845826. S2CID 18741604.
  77. ^ "Theory of Beauty – Facial Attractiveness – Low-Complexity Art". www.idsia.ch. Archived from the original on 6 June 2014. Retrieved 22 October 2017.
  78. ^ Schmidhuber, J. (1991). Curious model-building control systems. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. Vol. 2. Singapore: IEEE press. pp. 1458–1463. doi:10.1109/IJCNN.1991.170605.
  79. ^ J. Schmidhuber. Papers on artificial curiosity since 1990: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html Archived 18 September 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  80. ^ Schmidhuber, J. (2006). "Developmental robotics, optimal artificial curiosity, creativity, music, and the fine arts". Connection Science. 18 (2): 173–187. doi:10.1080/09540090600768658. S2CID 2923356.
  81. ^ "Schmidhuber's theory of beauty and curiosity in a German TV show" (in German). Br-online.de. 3 January 2018. Archived from the original on 3 June 2008.
  82. ^ Datta, R.; Joshi, D.; Li, J.; Wang, J. (2006). "Computer Vision – ECCV 2006". Europ. Conf. on Computer Vision. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3953. Springer. pp. 288–301. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.81.5178. doi:10.1007/11744078_23. ISBN 978-3540338369.
  83. ^ Wong, L.-K.; Low, K.-L. (2009). "Saliency-enhanced image aesthetic classification". Int. Conf. on Image Processing. IEEE. doi:10.1109/ICIP.2009.5413825.
  84. ^ Wu, Y.; Bauckhage, C.; Thurau, C. (2010). "2010 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition". Int. Conf. on Pattern Recognition. IEEE. pp. 1586–1589. doi:10.1109/ICPR.2010.392. ISBN 978-1424475421.
  85. ^ Faria, J.; Bagley, S.; Rueger, S.; Breckon, T.P. (2013). "Challenges of Finding Aesthetically Pleasing Images" (PDF). Proc. International Workshop on Image and Audio Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services. IEEE. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 19 June 2013.
  86. ^ a b Chio, Cecilia Di; Brabazon, Anthony; Ebner, Marc; Farooq, Muddassar; Fink, Andreas; Grahl, Jörn; Greenfield, Gary; Machado, Penousal; O'Neill, Michael (2010). Applications of Evolutionary Computation: EvoApplications 2010: EvoCOMNET, EvoENVIRONMENT, EvoFIN, EvoMUSART, and EvoTRANSLOG, Istanbul, Turkey, April 7–9, 2010, Proceedings. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media. p. 302. ISBN 978-3642122415.
  87. ^ "Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine – Instant Impersonal Assessment of Photos". Penn State University. Archived from the original on 9 May 2009. Retrieved 21 June 2009.
  88. ^ Manaris, B., Roos, P., Penousal, M., Krehbiel, D., Pellicoro, L. and Romero, J.; A Corpus-Based Hybrid Approach to Music Analysis and Composition; Proceedings of 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07); Vancouver, BC; 839–845 2007.
  89. ^ a b Hammoud, Riad (2007). Interactive Video: Algorithms and Technologies. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media. p. 162. ISBN 978-3540332145.
  90. ^ Dubnov, S.; Musical Information Dynamics as Models of Auditory Anticipation; in Machine Audition: Principles, Algorithms and Systems, Ed. W. Weng, IGI Global publication, 2010.
  91. ^ Shimura, Arthur P.; Palmer, Stephen E. (2012). Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains, and Experience. Oxford University Press. p. 279.
  92. ^ Giannini AJ (December 1993). "Tangential symbols: using visual symbolization to teach pharmacological principles of drug addiction to international audiences". Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. 33 (12): 1139–1146. doi:10.1002/j.1552-4604.1993.tb03913.x. PMID 7510314. S2CID 32304779.
  93. ^ Kent, Alexander (2019). "Maps, Materiality and Tactile Aesthetics". The Cartographic Journal. 56 (1): 1–3. doi:10.1080/00087041.2019.1601932.
  94. ^ Kent, Alexander (2005). "Aesthetics: A Lost Cause in Cartographic Theory?". The Cartographic Journal. 42 (2): 182–188. doi:10.1179/000870405X61487. S2CID 129910488.
  95. ^ Moshagen, M.; Thielsch, M.T. (2010). "Facets of visual aesthetics". International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 68 (10): 689–709. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2010.05.006. S2CID 205266500. Archived from the original on 25 July 2020. Retrieved 2 June 2020.
  96. ^ Visual Aesthetics. Interaction-design.org. Archived from the original on 12 August 2012. Retrieved 31 July 2012.
  97. ^ Lavie, T.; Tractinsky, N. (2004). "Assessing dimensions of perceived visual aesthetics of web sites". International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 60 (3): 269–298. doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2003.09.002. S2CID 205265682.
  98. ^ Guy Sircello, A New Theory of Beauty. Princeton Essays on the Arts, 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
  99. ^ Guy Sircello, Love and Beauty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.
  100. ^ Guy Sircello, "How Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible?" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 51, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 541–550
  101. ^ Peter Osborne, Anywhere Or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso Books, London, 2013. pp. 3 & 51
  102. ^ Tedman, G. (2012) Aesthetics & Alienation, Zero Books
  103. ^ Gregory Loewen, Aesthetic Subjectivity, 2011 pp. 36–37, 157, 238)
  104. ^ Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 155. ISBN 978-0198760610
  105. ^ Pierre Bourdieu, "Postscript", in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 485–500. ISBN 978-0674212770; and David Harris, "Leisure and Higher Education", in Tony Blackshaw, ed., Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies (London: Routledge, 2013), 403. ISBN 978-1136495588 and books.google.com/books?id=gc2_zubEovgC&pg=PT403
  106. ^ Laurie, Timothy (2014). "Music Genre as Method". Cultural Studies Review. 20 (2). doi:10.5130/csr.v20i2.4149.

Sources[edit]

Further reading[edit]

  • Mario Perniola, 20th Century Aesthetics. Towards A Theory of Feeling, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013, ISBN 978-1441118509.
  • Chung-yuan, Chang (1963–1970). Creativity and Taoism, A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry. New York: Harper Torchbooks. ISBN 978-0061319686.
  • Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. Edited by Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree. (Series: Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 59) Springer, Dordrecht / Heidelberg / London / New York 2010. ISBN 978-9048124701
  • Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
  • Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, New York: New American Library, 1971
  • Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, Andre Malraux's Theory of Art, Rodopi, 2009
  • Derek Allan. Art and Time, Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
  • Augros, Robert M., Stanciu, George N., The New Story of Science: mind and the universe, Lake Bluff, Ill.: Regnery Gateway, 1984. ISBN 0895268337 (has significant material on Art, Science and their philosophies)
  • John Bender and Gene Blocker, Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics 1993.
  • René Bergeron. L'Art et sa spiritualité. Québec, QC.: Éditions du Pelican, 1961.
  • Christine Buci-Glucksmann (2003), Esthétique de l'éphémère, Galilée. (French)
  • Ralf van Bühren, ed. (2024). Writing: what for and for whom. The joys and travails of the artist. Roma: EDUSC. ISBN 979-12-5482-224-1
  • Noël Carroll (2000), Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press.
  • Mario Costa (1999) (in Italian), L'estetica dei media. Avanguardie e tecnologia, Milan: Castelvecchi, ISBN 8882101657.
  • Benedetto Croce (1922), Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic.
  • E.S. Dallas (1866), The Gay Science, 2 volumes, on the aesthetics of poetry.
  • Danto, Arthur (2003), The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, Open Court.
  • Stephen Davies (1991), Definitions of Art.
  • Terry Eagleton (1990), The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell. ISBN 0631163026
  • Susan L. Feagin and Patrick Maynard (1997), Aesthetics. Oxford Readers.
  • Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds.) (2000), Differential Aesthetics. London: Ashgate. ISBN 075461493X
  • Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. 3rd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2013.
  • Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (1995), Einführung in die Ästhetik, Munich, W. Fink.
  • David Goldblatt and Lee B. Brown, ed. (2010), Aesthetics: A Reader in the Philosophy of the Arts. 3rd ed. Pearson Publishing.
  • Theodore Gracyk (2011), The Philosophy of Art: An Introduction. Polity Press.
  • Greenberg, Clement (1960), "Modernist Painting", The Collected Essays and Criticism 1957–1969, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 85–92.
  • Evelyn Hatcher (ed.), Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. 1999
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1975), Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Hans Hofmann and Sara T Weeks; Bartlett H Hayes; Addison Gallery of American Art; Search for the real, and other essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1967) OCLC 1125858
  • Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History and Visual Studies. Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0300097891
  • Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (eds.), Women Artists at the Millennium. Massachusetts: October Books/MIT Press, 2006. ISBN 026201226X
  • Kant, Immanuel (1790), Critique of Judgement, Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett Publishing Co., 1987.
  • Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 4 vol. pp. xvii–521, pp. 555, pp. 536, pp. 572; 2224 total pages; 100 b/w photos; ISBN 978-0195113075. Covers philosophical, historical, sociological, and biographical aspects of Art and Aesthetics worldwide.
  • Kent, Alexander J. (2005). "Aesthetics: A Lost Cause in Cartographic Theory?". The Cartographic Journal. 42 (2): 182–188. doi:10.1179/000870405x61487. S2CID 129910488.
  • Søren Kierkegaard (1843), Either/Or, translated by Alastair Hannay, London, Penguin, 1992
  • Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. 2004
  • Carolyn Korsmeyer (ed.), Aesthetics: The Big Questions. 1998
  • Lyotard, Jean-François (1979), The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984.
  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1969), The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press.
  • David Novitz (1992), The Boundaries of Art.
  • Mario Perniola, The Art and Its Shadow, foreword by Hugh J. Silverman, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London-New York, Continuum, 2004.
  • Griselda Pollock, "Does Art Think?" In: Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (eds.) Art and Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003. 129–174. ISBN 0631227156.
  • Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007. ISBN 0415413745.
  • Griselda Pollock, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0415141281.
  • George Santayana (1896), The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. New York, Modern Library, 1955.
  • Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, 2001. ISBN 978-0691089591
  • Friedrich Schiller, (1795), On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Dover Publications, 2004.
  • Alan Singer and Allen Dunn (eds.), Literary Aesthetics: A Reader. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2000. ISBN 978-0631208693
  • Jadranka Skorin-Kapov, The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity. Lexington Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1498524568
  • Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, The Hague, 1980. ISBN 978-9024722334
  • Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (1–2, 1970; 3, 1974), The Hague, Mouton.
  • Markand Thakar Looking for the 'Harp' Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty. University of Rochester Press, 2011.
  • Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, Penguin Classics, 1995.
  • Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 0199229759
  • Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (1983) ISBN 1890318027
  • The London Philosophy Study Guide Archived 23 September 2009 at the Wayback Machine offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Aesthetics Archived 23 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  • John M. Valentine, Beginning Aesthetics: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. McGraw-Hill, 2006. ISBN 978-0073537542
  • von Vacano, Diego, "The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory," Lanham MD: Lexington: 2007.
  • Thomas Wartenberg, The Nature of Art. 2006.
  • John Whitehead, Grasping for the Wind. 2001.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief, Oxford, Blackwell, 1966.
  • Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521297060
  • Gino Zaccaria, The Enigma of Art. On the Provenance of Artistic Creation, 2021, Brill, ISBN 978-9004448704
  • Ben Shneiderman, The Power of Aesthetic: Enhancing Visual Appeal in Your Designs Archived 20 March 2023 at the Wayback Machine, Ben, 1968.
  • Jean-Marc Rouvière, Au prisme du readymade, incises sur l'identité équivoque de l'objet préface de Philippe Sers et G. Litichevesky, Paris L'Harmattan 2023 ISBN 978-2-14-031710-1

Indian aesthetics[edit]

External links[edit]