AESTHETICS

 

  

 Aesthetics is the study of the principles that guide the formation and evaluation of art.

"Aesthetics" is sometimes referred to as the philosophy of art; and sometimes as aesthetic theory. The word "aesthetics" is derived from the Greek word "aisthanesthai" which means perception. The most common examples of art are music, painting, sculpture, writing, theater and dance. There are, of course, many varieties of each of these.

Much debate and discussion has occurred over the centuries about the central questions of aesthetics.

 

  • How do you determine artistic value?
  • What is art?
  • What is good art?
  • Are there standards for judging artistic experiences or are they relative?
  • How does art relate to nature?
  • How do you classify the arts?
  • Is art representational?
  • Must a work of art have meaning?
  • Must art be placed in its context to be felt or understood properly; or can it be viewed in isolation?
  • Is art justified if it is the expression of the artist?
  • Does art have to be practical?

ART

The word used in ancient Greece for art was "techne" which referred to a craft or specialized skill. Even in the Renaissance, artists thought of themselves as craftsmen. It was in the 17th century that some forms of art began to be conceived of from the point of view of an aesthetic experience. In the next century there arose the distinction between the fine arts and the useful arts. It is the fine arts which in general are now considered to be "art".

 PLATO

One of the early philosophers who talked about beauty and art was Plato (427-347 B.C.). In Plato's philosophy there was an independently existing world of ideas or forms. The highest idea was that of pure beauty. Physical objects such as works of art were beautiful to the extent they were imitations or reminders of that idea of pure beauty. And to see something as beautiful was to see the reflection of the idea of pure beauty in it. Art thus was a form of cognition.

SCHILLER

For Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), art was a form of playing. When something was produced, not because it was needed, but because a person just had a lot of extra energy and produced something with this energy, then this is art. It involved the use of the imagination. It was not the rational, formal impulse or the sensual, material impulse that motivated art, but the play impulse. The play impulse will result in a resemblance or image of reality which the artist freely constructs.

ROMANTICISM

For the Romantics, such as William Wordsworth (1770-1850), art is the expression of the artist's personal emotions. The imagination is the important faculty which the artist uses. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), for example described imagination as the power to transform the raw data of the senses into something new.

 CROCE

For Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), art was a form of cognition, but not cognition of the universal idea, but cognition of the individual thing. Art is intuition, which includes the concrete and immediate in experience. Croce was trying to describe a form of artistic knowledge which was not of purely intellectual forms and not based on the feelings of the Romantics.

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