Is It True That Aesthetic Value Cannot Rest on the Intrinsic Qualities of Art Alone?

April 28, 2022 Post a Comment

Fine art and the Aesthetic Experience

Beauty is something nosotros perceive and respond to. It may exist a response of awe and amazement, wonder and joy, or something else. It might resemble a "acme experience" or an epiphany. It might be watching a sunset or taking in the view from a mountaintop—the list goes on. Here we are referring to a kind of experience, an aesthetic response that is a response to the thing'southward representational qualities, whether it is man-made or natural (Silverman). The subfield of philosophy called aesthetics is devoted to the written report and theory of this experience of the beautiful; in the field of psychology, aesthetics is studied in relation to the physiology and psychology of perception.

Artful analysis is a careful investigation of the qualities which belong to objects and events that evoke an artful response. The aesthetic response is the thoughts and feelings initiated because of the grapheme of these qualities and the particular means they are organized and experienced perceptually (Silverman).

The aesthetic feel that we get from the world at big is dissimilar than the fine art-based aesthetic experience. It is important to recognize that nosotros are not saying that the natural wonder experience is bad or lesser than the art world experience; we are proverb it is unlike. What is different is the constructed nature of the art experience. The fine art experience is a blazon of aesthetic experience that as well includes aspects, content, and context of our humanness. When something is made by a human– nosotros know that there is some level of commonality and/or communal feel.

Why aesthetics is only the beginning in analyzing an artwork

We are also aware that beyond sensory and formal properties, all artwork is informed by its specific fourth dimension and place or the specific historical and cultural milieu information technology was created in (Silverman). For this reason we clarify artwork through not only aesthetics, but besides, historical and cultural contexts.

How nosotros engage in aesthetic analysis

Ofttimes the feelings or thoughts evoked as a result of contemplating an artwork are initially based primarily upon what is actually seen in the work. The first aspects of the artwork we respond to are its sensory properties, its formal properties, and its technical properties (Silverman). Colour is an case of a sensory property. Color is considered a kind of course and how class is arranged (due east.m., color) is a formal property. What medium (due east.g., painting, animation, etc.) the artwork is made of is an example of a technical property. These will exist discussed further in some other module. As Dr. Silverman, of California State Academy explains, the sequence of questions in an artful analysis could be: what practise we actually see? How is what is seen organized? And, what emotions and ideas are evoked every bit a result of what has been observed?

How Nosotros Assign Value to Art

The word art is frequently used to employ judgments of value, every bit in expressions like "that repast was a work of art" (implying that the cook is an artist) or "the art of deception" (the advanced, praiseworthy skill of deceiving). It is this utilise of the word as a measure of high value that gives the term its flavour of subjectivity.

Does It Take to Be Visually Pleasing or Not?

Making judgments of value requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, deciding whether an object or experience is considered art is a matter of finding it to be either attractive or repulsive. Though perception is e'er colored past feel, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly understood that what is non somehow visually pleasing cannot be art. However, "good" art is not e'er or even regularly visually pleasing to a majority of viewers. In other words, an artist'due south prime motivation demand not exist the pursuit of a pleasing system of form. As well, art ofttimes depicts terrible images made for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons.

A group of terrified civilians face a firing squad of soldiers; several bloody dead comrades lie at the civilians' feet.

Francisco de Goya, El Tres de Mayo, 1808(The Third of May, 1808). Epitome is in the public domain.

For example, the painting pictured above, by Francisco Goya, depicts the Spanish shootings on the third of May, 1808. Information technology is a graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading civilians. Still at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates Goya'southward keen artistic ability in limerick and execution, and information technology produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is required to define "art." The revision of what is popularly conceived of every bit being visually pleasing allows for a re-invigoration of and a new appreciation for the standards of art itself.

Art is often intended to entreatment to and connect with human being emotion. It tin agitate artful or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Art may be considered an exploration of the human condition or what it is to be human.

Factors Involved in the Judgment of Art

Seeing a rainbow often inspires an emotional reaction similar delight or joy. Visceral responses such equally disgust show that sensory detection is reflexively connected to facial expressions and to behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust tin often be a learned or cultural response, too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a smear of soup in a human's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting.

Artistic judgments may exist linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may requite the states a reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as increased centre charge per unit or widened eyes. These unconscious reactions may partly control, or at least reinforce, our judgment in the commencement place that the mural is sublime.

Besides, artistic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain oft saw African sculpture as ugly, merely just a few decades later, those same audiences saw those sculptures equally being beautiful. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of art can go linked to judgments of economical, political, or moral value. In a contemporary context, one might estimate a Lamborghini to exist beautiful partly considering it is desirable as a status symbol, or nosotros might judge it to be repulsive partly because it signifies for us over-consumption and offends our political or moral values.

Judging the value of an artwork is often partly intellectual and interpretative. Information technology is what a matter means or symbolizes for u.s. that is oftentimes what we are judging. Assigning value to artwork is often a circuitous negotiation of our senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, hidden behavior, conscious decision, grooming, instinct, sociological institutions, and other factors. Watch the video below to hear give-and-take on these factors in value judgement.

Watch this video on the artwork titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst. Consider the complexity of the interpretative experience of fine art and how value is assigned to an artwork.