CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Aesthetics is a subset of philosophy that looks at the nature of art and our experience of it. It appeared in the course of the eighteen century in Europe and advanced in England as philosophers grouped together such fields as poetry, sculpture, music, and dance. They classified all the arts into one category and called them les beaux arts or the fine arts. (Severyn)
Philosophers argued that reason on its own fail to explain beauty in that beauty may have some rational properties, such as “order, symmetry, and proportion,” but it is really an experience not explained by reason alone. It is understood through intuition and experienced with human feeling and emotion. An aesthetic experience could include a mixture of feeling, such as pleasure, rage, grief, suffering, and joy. (Severyn)
However, Immanuel Kant construed aesthetics as a field giving main concern to form over function. He then said that beauty was independent of any particular figure with which it was attached. A horse might be beautiful apart from whether it raced well. He proclaimed that knowledge is not something that is created merely by outside institutions but also by our natural constitution. The seat of judgement now moved from medieval reasoning toward the idea that human intuition could be a source of knowing. And aesthetics began to develop as a university discipline. (Severyn)
From many critics today aesthetics does not belong as a university discipline. Art historians have claimed that there is no such thing as art, there are only artists. And postmodernists question whether aesthetics should exist as a university subject, whether it is a legitimate inquiry. On the other hand, some critics repudiate that any universal criteria exist for judging art in all cultures and historical epochs. (Severyn)
Given that art historians had argued that there is no such thing as art, therefore definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Even though art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy, the philosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been debated. Coming to contemporary definitions they are of two main sorts.
One distinctively modern, conventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s institutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time, modern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art, and the relational properties of artworks that depend on works’ relations to art history, art genres, etc.
The less conventionalist sort of contemporary definition makes use of a broader, more traditional concept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational ones, and focuses on art’s pan-cultural and trans-historical characteristics.
However, any definition of art has to square with the following uncontroversial facts:
entities (artifacts or performances) intentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of aesthetic interest, often surpassing that of most everyday objects, exist in virtually every known human culture;
such entities, and traditions devoted to them, might be produced by non-human species, and might exist in other possible worlds;
such entities sometimes have non-aesthetic ceremonial or religious or propagandistic functions, and sometimes do not;
traditionally, artworks are intentionally endowed by their makers with properties, usually perceptual, having a significant degree of aesthetic interest, often surpassing that of most everyday objects;
art, so understood, has a complicated history: new genres and art-forms develop, standards of taste evolve, understandings of aesthetic properties and aesthetic experience change;
there are institutions in some but not all cultures which involve a focus on artifacts and performances having a high degree of aesthetic interest and lacking any practical, ceremonial, or religious use;
such institutions sometimes classify entities apparently lacking aesthetic interest with entities having a high degree of aesthetic interest;
many things other than artworks for example, natural entities (sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract entities (theories, proofs) are routinely described as having aesthetic properties.
By these very facts, those having to do with art’s cultural and historical topographies are accentuated by some definitions of art. Other definitions of art give main concern to explaining those facts that mirror art’s universality and continuity with other aesthetic phenomena.
Traditionally, at least as generally described in contemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be characterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are representational properties, expressive properties, and formal properties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions, expressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that artworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively, representational, expressive, and formal properties. (Severyn)
It is however not difficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example, possessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot be sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are representations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures have expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural objects and artifacts produced for the homeliest utilitarian purposes have formal properties but are not artworks. (Severyn)
Disbelief about the likelihood and value of a definition of art has been an important part of the discussion in aesthetics since the 1950s on, and though its influence has subsided, uneasiness about the definitional project persists. ( Kivy 1997, and Walton 2007).
Nonetheless a common domestic of arguments, enthused by Wittgenstein’s famous remarks about games (Wittgenstein, 1968), has it that the phenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the unification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a definition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a stifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this impulse is Weitz’s Open Concept Argument: any concept is open if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of decision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or to close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case; all open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a decision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Therefore art is indefinable (Weitz, 1956). Against this it is claimed that change does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over time, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather than capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from incorporating a novelty requirement.
Notably, it is however self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not its right to exist and given to that the penalty of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts.