Aesthetics

Abstract

Although aesthetics is ostensibly preoccupied with beauty and art, there has been much contestation regarding its proper object among philosophers and artists. The first step toward understanding this debate is to distinguish between aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Not all aesthetic phenomena are art, and not all art is aesthetic. In practice, however, the two terms have been used more or less interchangeably for most of the history of the modern system of the arts and the philosophical discipline of aesthetics, both of which were established in the eighteenth century in close connection with the articulation of a unified theory of art (see Kristeller 1951/2). Mimetic (representational), expressive, and formalist theories share the assumption that art aims at beauty or, at least, at certain aesthetic qualities that it conveys in a more concentrated, intense, and complex way than other objects in the world. Yet it is apparent that even the traditional theories of art were not exclusively concerned with the aesthetic value of its objects. They often posed questions concerning the metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and semiotic status of art, the arts, and individual works of art. However, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that the theory of art is simply more comprehensive than aesthetics, or that aesthetics is a subfield of the philosophy of art. For it is equally true that aesthetics has from the beginning been concerned with phenomena other than art, most notably, natural beauty and the sublime.