Aesthetics

1. Dialogue Education Update 3 Aesthetics THIS CD HAS BEEN PRODUCED FOR TEACHERS TO USE IN THE CLASSROOM. IT IS A CONDITION OF THE USE OF THIS CD THAT IT BE USED ONLY BY THE PEOPLE FROM SCHOOLS THAT HAVE PURCHASED THE CD ROM FROM DIALOGUE EDUCATION. (THIS DOES NOT PROHIBIT ITS USE ON A SCHOOL’S INTRANET)

2. Aesthetics • Philosophers have always been interested in art and aesthetic value. But what is art anyway? How should we define the notion of art? And what is it that distinguishes art from non-art? How about aesthetic value… Is aesthetic value something that resides in the object itself? Or does it have more to do with a kind of feeling, judgment, or sense of satisfaction had by an observer? Do the intentions of the artist play a role here? Should art have a purpose, such as evoking pleasure or conveying truth? 

3. What is Art • These questions apply to all forms of artistry…..music, photography, drama, dance, graffiti, films anything which we might ascribe the term beautiful or aesthetically pleasing.

4. Please rate the following images of beautiful women in terms of how aesthetically pleasing you find each.

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17. Plato indicated that the fact that we can rank things/people and scenery in terms of degrees of beauty indicates an ideal form of beauty that these things/people simply reflect.

18. Aesthetics • Philosophers have always been interested in art and aesthetic value. But what is art anyway?

19. Aesthetics • Click on the photo for Video (you must be on the internet to watch the video)

20. Aesthetics • What is Art? • How is it different from ‘design’ or ‘craft’? The main recent sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for “creative art” or “fine art.”

21. Aesthetics Greeks-If you look at a statue It is good art if it resembles an ideal form. Plato viewed art as a waste of time, as it distracted people from the search for the forms.

22. Aesthetics Early Christian and Byzantine Art saw in iconography more than just a depiction but rather the image stood in place of the person.

23. Aesthetics Immanuel Kant 17th and 18th Century - Theory of Taste was concerned with how we react.

24. Aesthetics • Does good art have intrinsic qualities?

25. Aesthetics Immanuel Kant What are the criteria for beauty: Can criteria for ‘beauty’ be universalised? Kant thought ‘yes’. Four principals of ‘beauty’ in art according to Kant; • Disinterest • Universal • Subjectivity • Necessary

26. Aesthetics 19th & 20thCentury Leo Tolstoy Leo Tolstoy claimed that what makes something art or not is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator.

27. Aesthetics • 20th Century Philosophers were concerned with the question ‘What is Art?’ Henri Matisse

28. Aesthetics Woody Allen “Someone will walk on the stage at Carnegie Hall and vomit and someone will call it art!”

29. Aesthetics All theories provide “Necessary and sufficient conditions” for good art across culture and history.

30. Aesthetics Gary Mitnik Definition of Art ‘Significant Forms’ was promoted as the criteria for answering the question “What is art?

31. Aesthetics The philosopher Denis Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics: • Expertise or virtuosity. • Non-utilitarian pleasure. • Style. • Criticism. • Imitation. • Special focus. • Imagination.

32. Aesthetics • Ludwig Wittgenstein Family resemblance concept- instead of necessary and essential conditions beauty/art falls within families in which there are some common features within that family.

33. Aesthetics Dado- ‘The fountain The cubists, Dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements struggled against the conception that beauty was central to the definition of art.

34. Aesthetics • Arthur Danto suggested that something is art if it is presented to the art world.

35. Discussion about Bill Hensen’s Images on the ABC 7.30 report. • Click on the image and open to full page. (Note you will have to be connected to the internet to view the video)

36. Aesthetics Conventionlism • “Art” is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as conventional art is considered art regardless of formal definitions.

37. Aesthetics Values theory questions– • What makes a work of art good? • What is the role of intention? • How do we evaluate a piece of art? • Do good works of art have moral value? • What relevance should we place on the intention of the creator?

38. Aesthetics • Actual Intentialism- the artist’s intentions indicate the content of the art. • Anti-Intentialism- The author’s intentions are completely irrelevant to the aesthetic value.

39. Aesthetics Pablo Picasso Hypothetical intentialism- One is concerned to evaluate art on the basis of a hypothesis about what the intentions of the author might mean in the context of their social environment.

40. Aesthetics Conventionalist view How does a painting represent something?

41. Aesthetics • Realist – perspective matters- The art piece depicting a landscape appears as it would look to a person looking at the actual landscape. It has the same psychological impact as the experience.

42. Aesthetics • Another concept, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the post-modern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard.

43. Aesthetics 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. Gary Mitnik

44. Aesthetics • Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context.

45. What is Beauty? -Community of Inquiry-Discussion Material • Watch the video and use it as a stimulus for a community of Inquiry discussion- See online resources for guidelines for a Community of Inquiry. • You need to be connected to the internet for the video to load. Click on the above photo and enlarge the video to full screen.

46. Aesthetics • The End

47. Bibliography • Augros, Robert M., Stanciu, George N., The New Story of Science: mind and the universe, Lake Bluff, Ill.: Regnery Gateway, c1984. ISBN 0895268337 (has significant material on Art, Science and their philosophies) • Feagin and Maynard, Aesthetics; Oxford readers1997. • Thomas Wartenberg, The Nature of Art. 2006. • John Bender and Gene Blocker Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics 1993. • Noel Carroll, Theories of Art Today. 2000. • Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, 1902 • E. S. Dallas, The Gay Science - in 2 volumes, on the aesthetics of poetry, published in 1866. • Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness. Pantheon, 2006. • Christine Buci-GlucksmannEsthetique De L'ephemere, Galilee, ISBN 2718606223 • Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell, 1990. ISBN 0-631-16302-6 • Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds.), Differential Aesthetics. London: Ashgate, 2000. ISBN 0-7546-1493-X • Hans Hofmann and Sara T Weeks; Bartlett H Hayes; Addison Gallery of American Art; Search for the real, and other essays (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1967) OCLC 1125858 • BerysGaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), "Routledge Companion to Aesthetics". London: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 0415327989 • David Goldblatt and Lee Brown, ed. Aesthetics: A Reader in the Philosophy of the Arts. 1997. • Evelyn Hatcher (ed.), Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. 1999 • Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History and Visual Studies. Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-300-09789-1

48. Bibliography • Alexander J. Kent, "Aesthetics: A Lost Cause in Cartographic Theory?" The Cartographic Journal, 42(2) 182-8, 2005. • Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. 2004 • Carolyn Korsmeyer (ed.), Aesthetics: The Big Questions. 1998 • MartinusNijhoff, A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, The Hague, 1980. • Griselda Pollock, "Does Art Think?" In: Dana Arnold and Margaret Iverson (eds.) Art and Thought. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003. 129-174. ISBN 0-631-22715-6. • Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007. ISBN 0415413745. • George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. (1896) New York, Modern Library, 1955. • Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, 2001. ISBN 9780691089591 • Friedrich Schiller, (1795), On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Dover Publications, 2004. • Alan Singer & Allen Dunn (eds.), Literary Aesthetics: A Reader. Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2000. ISBN 978-0631208693 • WładysławTatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (1–2, 1970; 3, 1974), The Hague, Mouton. • Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? • John M. Valentine, Beginning Aesthetics: An Introduction To The Philosophy of Art. McGraw-Hill, 2006. ISBN 978-0073537542 • John Whitehead, Grasping for the Wind. 2001. • Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521 29706 0 • Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, 1974, paperpack, or hardback first edition ISBN 0-688-00230-7 • Wikipedia- Aesthetics- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics