Have you ever
driven through a National Park and were awed by the surrounding rock
formations? Have you ever gone to the Grand Canyon and could not believe the grandeur of the
surrounding rock formations? Have you ever traveled the back roads of certain states
and were delighted at the remarkable rock formations lining the road’s path?
All these elements
are the results of erosion.
erode(i rod’) vt. e.rod’ed, e’rod’ing[ Fr. eroder < L. erodere
<e-, out, off + <I>rodere, to gnaw: see RAZE ]1.
to eat into; wear away; disintegrate [ acid erodes metal ]2. to form by wearing away
gradually [ the running water eroded a
gully ]3.
to cause to deteriorate, decay, or vanish –vi.
to become eroded –e.rod’i.bleadj.
erosion (i ro’zhen) n. [L. eroisio <<I>erosus, pp. of erodere] an eroding or
being eroded – e.ro’sion.al adj.
Pretty much all
that we look at in our natural environment has in some way been affected by the
natural elements of wind, water and fire. However, what is it about the visual
appeal of erosion? Is it our manifestation
that somehow these forms, colors and textures relate to something in our past,
some visual element that formed the way we think as an adult? Or have we trained our brains to think that
anything natural is beautiful? Or in
fact do we find some great beauty in this erosion just by its mere existence?
How do we determine
what is pleasing to us? How within a
split second can we comprehend the pleasure or disgust of something we see?
Excerpt from Wikipedia.
Aesthetic
judgment
Judgments of aesthetic value
clearly rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics
examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon.
Many see
natural beauty folded within petals of a rose. Immanuel
Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If he says that canary wine
is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds
him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone
has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is different
from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to
be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not
just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a
property of things."
Aesthetic judgments 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 our sensitivity "to pains as well as
pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." In David Hume: Essays Moral
Political and Literary. Indianapolis,
Literary Classics 5, 1987. Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to
capacity for pleasure. For Kant "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 our capacities of reflective contemplation.Immanuel
Kant, The Critique of Judgment. Judgments of
beauty are sensory, emotional, and intellectual all at once.
Viewer interpretations of beauty
possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste.
Aesthetics is the philosophical
notion of beauty. Taste is a result of education and awareness of elite
cultural values; therefore taste can be learned. Taste varies according to
class, cultural background, and education. Poor taste is usually seen as a
product of ignorance. According to Kant beauty is objective and universal; thus
certain things are beautiful to everyone. The contemporary view of beauty is
not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual
interpretations.
[edit] What factors are
involved in an aesthetic judgment?
Judgments of aesthetic value seem
to often involve many other kinds of issues as well. Responses such as disgust
show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial
expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust can often be a
learned or cultural issue too; 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 our physical
reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may give us a
reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as an increased heart rate or
widened eyes. These subconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of
what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.
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 being beautiful. The Abuse of Beauty,
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.[6]
We might judge a Lamborghini to be beautiful partly because it is desirable as
a status symbol, or we might judge it to be repulsive partly because it
signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political or moral values.[7]
"Part and Parcel in Animal and
Human Societies". in Studies in animal and human behavior, vol. 2. pp.
115-195. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971 (originally pub.
1950.) Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally
contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem to often be at least partly
intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us
that is often what we are judging.
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 behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological
institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which
theory one employs.
Anthropology,
especially the savanna hypothesis proposed by Gordon
Orians and others, predicts that some of the positive aesthetics that
people have are based on innate knowledge of productive human habitats. It had
been shown that people prefer and feel happier looking at trees with spreading
forms much more than looking at trees with other forms, or non-tree objects;
also Bright green
colors, linked with healthy plants with good nutrient qualities, were more
calming than other tree colors, including less bright greens and oranges.
[edit] Are different art
forms beautiful, disgusting, or boring in the same way?
A third major topic in the study of
aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. We can call a
person, a house, a symphony, a fragrance, and a mathematical proof beautiful. What
characteristics do they share which give them that status? What possible
feature could a proof and a fragrance both share in virtue of which they both
count as beautiful? What makes a painting beautiful is quite different from
what makes music beautiful, which suggests that each art form has its own
language for the judgement of aesthetics.
[8]
At the same time, there is
seemingly quite a lack of words to express oneself accurately when making an
aesthetic judgement. An aesthetic judgement cannot be an empirical judgement.
Therefore, due to impossibility for precision, there is confusion about what
interpretations can be culturally negotiated. Due to the inaccuracy of the
English language, two completely different feelings experienced by two
different people can be represented by an identical verbal expression.
Wittgenstein stated this in his lectures on aesthetics and language games.
A collective identification of
beauty, with willing participants in a given social spectrum, maybe a socially
negotiated phenomenon, discussed in a culture or context. Is there some
underlying unity to aesthetic judgment and is there some way to articulate the
similarities of a beautiful house, beautiful proof, and beautiful sunset?
[9]
Defining it requires a description of the entire phenomenon, as Wittgenstein
argued in his lectures on aesthetics. Likewise there has been long debate on
how perception of beauty in the natural world, especially perception of the
human form as beautiful, is supposed to relate to perceiving beauty in art or artefacts.
This goes back at least to Kant, with some echoes even in St. Bonaventure.[citation needed]
[edit] Aesthetics and the
philosophy of art
It is not uncommon to find
aesthetics used as a synonym for the philosophy of art, although it is also
not uncommon to find thinkers insisting that we distinguish these two closely
related fields. In practice we distinguish between aesthetic and artistic
judgements, one refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an
object (not necessarily an art object), while the other refers to the
appreciation or criticism of an art work.
[edit] What is
"art?"
How best to define the term “art”
is a subject of constant contention; many books and journal articles have been
published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term “art”.
[10]Theodor
Adorno claimed in 1969 “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is
self-evident.”
[11][12] Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists
and programmers all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give
it operational definitions that are not very similar to each other. Further it
is clear that even the basic meaning of the term "art" has changed
several times over the centuries, and has changed within the 20th century as
well.
The main recent sense of the word
“art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or “fine art.”
Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to
engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards
consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a
functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art,
a suggestion which is highly disputed by many Contemporary
Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial
way it may be considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended
as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued
that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the
actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.
[13]
Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.
Even as late as 1912 it was normal
in the West to assume that all art aims at beauty, and thus that anything that
wasn't trying to be beautiful couldn't count as art. The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky,
and many later art movements struggled against this conception that beauty was
central to the definition of art, with such success that, according to Danto, "Beauty
had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960’s but from the
advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."[11]
Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce’s
theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan’s
theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian
Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with
"expression".
[14]
Another concept, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty,"
is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by
the postmodern
philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard.
Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no
definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a
cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz
or Beuys).
Another approach is to say that “art” is basically a sociological category,
that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered
art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of
art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed
by George
Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a
store-bought urinal
to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel
Duchamp (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery),
which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that
define art.
Proceduralists often suggest that
it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it
art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the
institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large.
Whereas if exactly the same set of words was written by a journalist, intending
them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would
not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what makes
something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the
intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe
Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what
function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a
non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function
in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '
[edit] What should we
judge when we judge art?
Art can be difficult at the
metaphysical and ontological levels as well as at the value
theory level. When we see a performance of Hamlet, how
many works of art are we experiencing, and which should we judge? Perhaps there
is only one relevant work of art, the whole performance, which many different
people have contributed to, and which will exist briefly and then disappear.
Perhaps the manuscript by Shakespeare is a distinct work of art from the play
by the troupe, which is also distinct from the performance of the play by this
troupe on this night, and all three can be judged, but are to be judged by
different standards.
Perhaps every person involved
should be judged separately on his or her own merits, and each costume or line
is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying
them all). Similar problems arise for music, film and even painting. Am I to
judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in
its context of presentation by the museum workers?
These problems have been made even
more difficult by the rise of conceptual
art since the 1960s. Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes are
nearly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes at the time. It would be a
mistake to praise Warhol for the design of his boxes (which were designed by
Steve Harvey), yet the conceptual move of exhibiting these boxes as art in a
museum together with other kinds of paintings is Warhol's. Are we judging
Warhol’s concept? His execution of the concept in the medium? The curator’s insight
in letting Warhol display the boxes? The overall result? Our experience or
interpretation of the result? Ontologically, how are we to think of the work of
art? Is it a physical object? Several objects? A class of objects? A mental
object? A fictional object? An abstract
object? An event? Or simply an Act?
[edit]
What should art be
like?
Many goals have been argued for
art, and aestheticians often argue that some goal or another is superior in
some way. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued in 1960
that each artistic medium should seek that which makes it unique among the
possible mediums and then purify itself of anything other than expression of
its own uniqueness as a form.[15]
The DadaistTristan
Tzara on the other hand saw the function of art in 1918 as the destruction
of a mad social order. “We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the
individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world
abandoned to the hands of bandits.”[16]
Formal goals, creative goals, self-expression, political goals, spiritual
goals, philosophical goals, and even more perceptual or aesthetic goals have
all been popular pictures of what art should be like.
[edit]
What is the value
of art?
Closely related to the question of
what art form is appropriate is the question of what is the value of art. Is
art a means of gaining knowledge of some special kind? Does it give insight
into the human condition? How does art relate to science or religion? Is
art perhaps a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation? Does art
make us more moral? Can it uplift us spiritually? Is art perhaps politics by
other means? Is there some value to sharing or expressing emotions? Might the
value of art for the artist be quite different from its value for the audience?
Might the value of art to society
be quite different from its value to individuals? Do the values of arts differ
significantly from form to form? Working on the intended value of art tends to
help define the relations between art and other acts.
Art clearly does have
spiritual goals in many contexts, but what exactly is the difference between
religious art and religion per se? The truth is complex - Art is both
useless in a functional sense and the most important human activity. Is has
been said, that a Vogon Starship arriving at the earth and ordering its
destruction would ask what use is humanity? The only justification humanity
could give would be a Shakespeare play, a Rembrandt or a Bach concerto. These
are the things of value which define humanity itself.
[edit] Aesthetic
universals
The philosopher Denis
Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics:[17]
Expertise or virtuosity. Technical artistic skills are
cultivated, recognized, and admired.Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake,
and don't 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 music and
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.Imagination. Artists and their audiences entertain
hypothetical worlds in the theater of the imagination.
It might be objected, however, that
there are rather too many exceptions to Dutton's categories. For example, the
installations of the contemporary artist Thomas
Hirschhorn 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' realisation). 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.
Increasingly, academics in both the
sciences and the humanities are looking to evolutionary psychology and cognitive
science in an effort to understand the connection between psychology and
aesthetics. Aside from Dutton, others exploring this realm include Brian Boyd,
Noel
Carroll, Nancy Easterlin, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Paul Hernadi, Bracha
Ettinger, Patrick Hogan, Elaine
Scarry, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Wendy Steiner,
Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.
[edit]
Anti-Aesthetics
The philosophy of aesthetics has
been criticized by some sociologists and writers about art and society. Raymond
Williams argues that there is no unique aesthetic object but a continuum of
cultural forms from ordinary speech to experiences that are signaled as art by
a frame, institution or special event. Pierre
Bourdieu also takes issue with Kant's aesthetics and argues that it
represents an experience that is the product of an elevated class habitus and
scholarly leisure.
[edit] History of
aesthetics
It has been
suggested that this article or section be merged into History of aesthetics
(pre-20th-century). (Discuss)
Bronze
sculpture, thought to be either Poseidon or Zeus, National Archaeological Museum
of Athens
[edit] Ancient aesthetics
We have examples of pre-historic
art, but they are rare, and the context of their production and use is not
very clear, so we can little more than guess at the aesthetic doctrines that
guided their production and interpretation.
Ancient art
was largely, but not entirely, based on the seven great ancient civilizations: Egypt,
Mesopotamia,
Greece,
Rome,
Persia,
India
and China. Each of
these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style
in its art.
Greece
had the most influence on the development of aesthetics in the West. This
period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development
of corresponding skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically
correct proportions. Furthermore, in many Western and Eastern cultures alike,
traits such as body hair are rarely depicted in art that addresses physical
beauty.[cite this quote] What is more in
contrast with this Greek-Western aesthetic taste, is the genre of grotesque.[18]Greek
philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful
in and of themselves. Plato
felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity
among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle
found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and
definiteness.
[edit] Islamic aesthetics
Islamic art
is not, properly speaking, an art pertaining to religion only. The term "Islamic" refers
not only to the religion, but to any form of art created in an Islamic
culture or in an Islamic context.
It would also be a mistake to assume that
all Muslims are
in agreement on the use of art in religious observance, the proper place of art
in society, or the relation between secular art and the demands placed on the
secular world to conform to religious precepts. Islamic art frequently adopts
secular elements and elements that are frowned upon, if not forbidden, by some Islamic theologians.[19]
According to Islam, human works of
art are inherently flawed compared to the work of God; thus, it is believed by
many that to attempt to depict in a realistic form any animal or person is
insolence to God. This tendency, enforced by often strict religious authority,
has had the effect of narrowing the field of artistic possibility to such forms
of art as Arabesque,
mosaic, Islamic calligraphy, and Islamic architecture, as well as more
generally any form of abstraction that can claim the status of
non-representational art.
This negative restriction of
possibilities has been explored by artists as an outlet to artistic expression,
and has been cultivated to become a positive style and tradition, emphasizing
the decorative function of art, or its religious functions via
non-representational forms such as Geometric patterns, floral patterns, and arabesques.
It is a common myth that human or
animal depiction is forbidden altogether in Islamic cultures. In fact, human
portrayals can be found in all Islamic cultures with varying degrees of
acceptance by religious authorities. It is only human representation for the
purpose of worship that is uniformly considered idolatry as
forbidden in Sharia
law. There are also many depictions of Muhammad, Islam's chief
prophet, in historical Islamic art.[20][21]
The calligraphic arts grew out an
effort to devote oneself to the study of the Koran. By patiently transcribing
each word of the text, the writer was made to contemplate the meaning of it. As
time passed, these calligraphic works began to be prized as works of art,
growing increasingly elaborate in the illumination and stylizing of the text.
These illuminations were applied to other works besides the Koran, and it
became a respected art form in and of itself.
[edit] Indian aesthetics
Indian art
evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states
in the audience, or with representing them symbolically. According to Kapila
Vatsyayan, "Classical Indian architecture, sculpture,
painting,
literature (kaavya), music,
and dancing
evolved their own rules conditioned by their respective media, but they shared
with one another not only the underlying spiritual beliefs of the Indian
religio-philosophic mind, but also the procedures by which the relationships of
the symbol and the spiritual states were worked out in detail."
Of particular concern to Indian
drama and literature is the term 'rasa' referring generally to the emotional
flavors crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive
spectator' or 'sahRdaya.' Very early poets like Kālidāsa
were attentive to rasa, which blossomed into a fully developed aesthetic
system. Even in contemporary India
the term rasa denoting "flavor" is used colloquially to describe the
aesthetic experiences in films; "māsala
mix" describes popular Hindi cinema films which serve a balanced emotional
meal, savored as rasa by the spectator.
Rasa theory blossoms beginning with
the SaMskrit text Nātyashāstra ('nātya' meaning drama and 'shāstra' meaning science of), a work attributed
to Bharata
Muni where the Gods declare that drama is the 'Fifth Veda' because it is
suitable for the degenerate age as the best form of religious instruction.
While the date of composition varies wildly among scholars, ranging from the
era of Plato and Aristotle to the seventh century CE The Nātyashāstra
presents the aesthetic concepts of rasa-s and their associated bhāva-s in Chapters Six and Seven respectively,
which appear to be independent of the work as a whole. Eight rasa-s and
associated bhāva-s are named
and their enjoyment is likened to savoring a meal: rasa is the enjoyment of
flavors that arise from the proper preparation of ingredients and the quality
of ingredients. What rasa actually is, in a theoretical sense, is not discussed
and given the Nātyashāstra's pithy wording it is
unlikely the exact understanding of the original author(s) will be known.
The theory of the rasa-s develops
significantly with the Kashmiri aesthetician Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics,
the Dhvanyāloka which
introduces the ninth rasa, shānta-rasa
as a specifically religious feeling of peace (shānta) which arises from its bhāva, weariness of the pleasures of the world. The primary
purpose of this text is to refine the literary concept 'dhvani' or poetic
suggestion, by arguing for the existence of 'rasa-dhvani,' primarily in forms
of SaMskrit including a word, sentence or whole work "suggests" a
real-world emotional state or bhāva,
but thanks to aesthetic distance, the sensitive spectator relishes the rasa,
the aesthetic flavor of tragedy, heroism or romance.
The 9th - 10th century master of
the religious system known as "the nondual Shaivism of Kashmir" (or
"Kashmir Shaivism")and aesthetician, Abhinavagupta brought rasa
theory to its pinnacle in his separate commentaries on the Dhvanyāloka, the Dhvanyāloka-locana (translated by Ingalls, Masson
and Patwardhan, 1992) and the Abhinavabharati, his commentary on the Nātyashāstra,
portions of which are translated by Gnoli and Masson and Patwardhan.
Abhinavagupta offers for the first time a technical definition of rasa which is
the universal bliss of the Self or Atman colored by the emotional tone of a
drama. Shānta-rasa functions as
an equal member of the set of rasa-s but is simultaneously distinct being the
most clear form of aesthetic bliss.
Abhinavagupta likens it to the string of a
jeweled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for most people, it is
the string that gives form to the necklace, allowing the jewels of the other
eight rasa-s to be relished. Relishing the rasa-s and particularly shānta-rasa is hinted as being as-good-as but
never-equal-to the bliss of Self-realization experienced by yogis.
[edit] Chinese aesthetics
Chinese art
has a long history of varied styles and emphases. In ancient times philosophers
were already arguing about aesthetics. Confucius
emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry) in
broadening human nature and aiding “li” (etiquette, the rites) in bringing us
back to what is essential about humanity. His opponent Mozi, however, argued
that music and fine arts were classist and wasteful, benefiting the rich but
not the common people.
By the 4th century A.D., artists
were debating in writing over the proper goals of art as well. Gu Kaizhi
has 3 surviving books on this theory of painting, for example, and it's not
uncommon to find later artist/scholars who both create art and write about the
creating of art. Religious and philosophical influence on art was common (and
diverse) but never universal; it is easy to find art that largely ignores
philosophy and religion in almost every Chinese time period.
[edit] Sub-Saharan African
aesthetics
The Great Mosque's signature trio of minarets
overlooks the central market of Djenné. Unique Malian aesthetic
Sub-Saharan African art
existed in many forms and styles, and with fairly little influence from outside
Africa. Most of
it followed traditional forms and the aesthetic norms were handed down orally
as well as written. Sculpture and performance
art are prominent, and abstract and partially abstracted forms are valued,
and were valued long before influence from the Western tradition began in
earnest.
The Nok
culture is testimony to this. The mosque of Timbuktu shows that specific areas of Africa
developed unique aesthetics.
[edit] Western medieval
aesthetics
Surviving medieval
art is largely religious in focus, and typically was funded by the State, Orthodox or Roman Catholic church, powerful
ecclesiastical individuals, or wealthy secular patrons. Often the pieces have
an intended liturgical function, such as chalices
or churches.
Figurative examination was typically not an important goal, but being
religiously uplifting was.
Medieval Art Objects were made from
rare and valuable materials, such as Gold and Lapis, the cost of which was often superior to the wages of the
maker.
Reflection on the nature and
function of art and aesthetic experiences follows similar lines. St. Bonaventure’s
“Retracing the Arts to Theology” is typical and discusses the skills of the
artisan as gifts given by God for the purpose of disclosing God to mankind via
four “lights”: the light of skill in mechanical arts which discloses the world
of artifacts, as guided by the light of sense perception which discloses the
world of natural forms, as guided by the light of philosophy which discloses
the world of intellectual truth, as guided by the light of divine wisdom which
discloses the world of saving truth.
Lorsch
Gospels 778–820. Charlemagne's Court School.
As the medieval world shifts into
the Renaissance,
art again returns to focus on this world and on secular issues of human life.
The philosophy of art of the ancient Greeks and Romans is re-appropriated.
[edit]
Modern aesthetics
From the late 17th to the early
20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often
called modernism.
German and British
thinkers emphasised beauty
as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as
necessarily aiming at beauty.
For Baumgarten aesthetics is the science
of the sense experiences, a younger sister of logic, and beauty is thus the
most perfect kind of knowledge that sense experience can have. For Kant
the aesthetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but universal
truth, since all people should agree that “this rose is beautiful” if
it in fact is. However, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of
features. For Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the
most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.
For Hegel all culture is a matter of
"absolute spirit" coming to be manifest to itself, stage by stage.
Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immediately to
sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective revelation of
beauty.
For Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation of beauty
is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here
we contemplate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus
any intrusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty.
The British were largely divided
into intuitionist and analytic camps. The intuitionists believed that aesthetic
experience was disclosed by a single mental faculty of some kind.
For the Earl of Shaftesbury this was identical to the
moral sense, beauty just is the sensory version of moral goodness. For
Wittgenstein aesthetics consisted in the description of a whole culture which
is a linguistic impossibility. That which constitutes aesthetics lies out side
the realm of the language game.
William
Hogarth, self-portrait, 1745
For Hutcheson beauty is disclosed by an
inner mental sense, but is a subjective fact rather than an objective one.
Analytic theorists like Lord Kames, William
Hogarth, and Edmund Burke hoped to reduce beauty to some list of
attributes.
Hogarth, for example, thinks that beauty consists of (1) fitness of
the parts to some design; (2) variety in as many ways as possible; (3)
uniformity, regularity or symmetry, which is only beautiful when it helps to
preserve the character of fitness; (4) simplicity or distinctness, which gives
pleasure not in itself, but through its enabling the eye to enjoy variety with
ease; (5) intricacy, which provides employment for our active energies, leading
the eye on "a wanton kind of chase"; and (6) quantity or magnitude,
which draws our attention and produces admiration and awe.
Later analytic
aestheticians strove to link beauty to some scientific theory of psychology
(such as James
Mill) or biology (such as Herbert
Spencer).
[edit] Post-modern
aesthetics and Psychoanalysis
Early twentieth century artists,
poets and composers challenged the assumption that beauty was central to art
and aesthetics. Various attempts have been made since then to define
Post-modern aesthetics.
This challenge, 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. Marshall
McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a
"counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually
invisible about a society. 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 (art critic) 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 - 'kalos').[22]Brian
Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.[23]Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian
distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitschrealism, "...will enable us to see only
by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."[24][25]Sigmund
Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis
mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.[26]
Following Freud and
Initial image of a
Mandelbrot set zoom sequence with continuously coloured environment
Merleau-Ponty,[27]Jacques
Lacan approached the aesthetical object in the visual field by the notion
of the gaze as
lacking and as phallic "objet a" that follows the psychic
"masculine" principle of separation and castration.[28][29]
[edit] Aesthetics and
Information
In the 1970s, Abraham
Moles and Frieder Nake were among the first to analyze links
between aesthetics, information processing, and information theory[30][31].
In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an algorithmic
theory of beauty
which takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates:
among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective
observer, the aesthetically most pleasing one is the one with the shortest
description, given the observer’s previous knowledge and his particular method
for encoding the data[32][33].
Whenever the observer's learning process (which may be a predictive neural
network) leads to improved data compression such that the observation
sequence can be described by fewer bits than before, the temporary interestingness
of the data corresponds to the number of saved bits. This compression progress
is proportional to the observer's internalreward, also called
curiosity
reward. A reinforcement learning algorithm is used to
maximize future expected reward by learning to execute action sequences that
cause additional interesting input data with yet unknown but learnable
predictability or regularity. The principles can be implemented on artificial
agents which then exhibit a form of artificialcuriosity[36][37][38][39].
[edit]
Applied aesthetics
Main
article: Applied aesthetics
As well as being applied to art
aesthetics can also be applied to cultural objects. Aesthetic coupling between
art-objects and medical topics was made by speakers working for the US
Information Agency[40]
This coupling was made to reinforce the learning paradigm when English-language
speakers used translators to address audiences in their own country. These
audiences were generally not fluent in the English language. It can also be
used in topics as diverse as mathematics, gastronomy and
fashion
design.
[edit] Truth as beauty,
mathematics , analytic philosophy, and physics
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 definetruth, outside of empirical
considerations. Beauty
and Truth have
been argued to be nearly synonymous.[41]
[edit] References
^ Zangwill, Nick. "Aesthetic
Judgment", Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008.^ Kelly (1998) p. ix^Review by Tom
Riedel (Regis University)^ Bruyn, Professor Severyn T. "Art and Aesthetics in
Action", Boston College, 2002. Retrieved 07-22-2008.^ Freeman, Lindsey (Phd) Remembering
Debord cannon-beach.net^ 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.^ Korsmeyer, Carolyn ed. Aesthetics:
The Big Questions 1998^ Consider Clement Greenberg’s arguments
in "On Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Aesthetics: A
Reader in Philosophy of Arts.^Immanuel
Kant, The Critique of Judgment.^ Davies, 1991, Carroll, 2000, et al.^ ab Danto, 2003^
Goodman,^ Novitz, 1992^ Brian Massumi, Deleuze, Guattari
and the Philosophy of Expression, CRCL, 24:3, 1997.^ Clement Greenberg, “On Modernist
Painting”.^ Tristan Tzara, Sept Manifestes Dada.^Denis
Dutton's Aesthetic Universals summarized by Steven
Pinker in The Blank Slate^Grotesque entry in Kelly 1998,
pp.338-341^ Davies, Penelope J.E. Denny, Walter B.
Hofrichter, Frima Fox. Jacobs, Joseph. Roberts, Ann M. Simon, David L.
Janson's History of Art, Prentice Hall; 2007, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Seventh Edition, ISBN
0131934554 pg. 277^The
Arab Contribution to Islamic Art: From the Seventh to the Fifteenth
Centuries, Wijdan Ali, American Univ in Cairo Press, December
10 1999, ISBN
9774244761^From the
Literal to the Spiritual: The Development of the Prophet Muhammad's
Portrayal from 13th century Ilkhanid Miniatures to 17th century Ottoman
Art, Wijdan Ali, EJOS (Electronic
Journal of Oriental Studies), volume IV, issue 7, p. 1-24, 2001^ 'Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art' in Art
Journal v. 63 no. 2 (Summer 2004) p. 24-35^ Massumi, Brian, (ed.), A Shock to
Thought. Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London & NY:
Routeledge, 2002. ISBN
0-415-23804-8^ Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, What is
Postmodernism?, in The Postmodern Condition, Minnesota
and Manchester,
1984.^ Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, Scriptures:
Diffracted Traces, in Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number
1, 2004.^ Freud, Sigmund, "The
Uncanny" (1919). Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work
of Sigmund Freud, 17:234-36. London:
The Hogarth Press^ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964),
"The Visible and the Invisible". Northwestern University Press. ISBN
0-810-10457-1^ Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI), NY: W.
W. Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN
0-393-31775-7.^ Doyle, Laura (Ed.), Bodies of
Resistance. Evaston: Northwestern University Press. 2001. ISBN
0-8101-1847-5^ A. Moles: Théorie de l'information
et perception esthétique, Paris,
Denoël, 1973 (Information Theory and aesthetical
perception)^ F Nake (1974). Ästhetik als
Informationsverarbeitung.
(Aesthetics
as information processing). Grundlagen und
Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik.
Springer, 1974, ISBN
3211812164, ISBN
9783211812167^J. Schmidhuber. Low-complexity art. Leonardo, Journal of
the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology,
30(2):97–103, 1997. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1576418^J. Schmidhuber. Papers on the theory of
beauty and low-complexity art since 1994: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html^J. Schmidhuber. Facial beauty and fractal
geometry. Cogprint Archive: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk ,
1998^J. Schmidhuber. Simple Algorithmic
Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity
& Creativity. Proc. 10th Intl. Conf. on Discovery Science (DS 2007) p.
26-38, LNAI 4755, Springer, 2007. Also in Proc. 18th Intl. Conf. on
Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2007) p. 32, LNAI 4754, Springer, 2007.
Joint invited lecture for DS 2007 and ALT 2007, Sendai, Japan,
2007. http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.0674^J. Schmidhuber. Curious model-building
control systems. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Singapore,
vol 2, 1458–1463. IEEE press, 1991^J. Schmidhuber. Papers on artificial
curiosity since 1990: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html^J. Schmidhuber. Developmental robotics,
optimal artificial curiosity, creativity, music, and the fine arts. Connection
Science, 18(2):173–187, 2006^ Schmidhuber's theory of beauty and
curiosity in a German TV show:
