Aesthetics

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"Aesthetic" redirects here. For the 19th century art movement, see Aestheticism.

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Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art, is the study of beauty and taste. It is about interpreting
works of art and art movements or theories. The term aesthetic is also used to designate a
particular style, for example the "chess aesthetics", or the "Japanese aesthetic".
As well as being applied to art, aesthetics can also be applied to cultural objects. Aesthetic
design principles include ornamentation, edge delineation, texture, flow, solemnity,
symmetry, color, granularity, the interaction of sunlight and shadows, transcendence, and
harmony.

The word aesthetic is also an adjective and adverb relating to cosmetology and medicine,
as in aesthetic medicine.
Also spelt sthetics and esthetics, the word is derived from the Ancient Greek
(aisthetikos, meaning "esthetic, sensitive, sentient, pertaining to sense perception"), which
in turn was derived from (aisthanomai, meaning "I perceive, feel, sense").[1]

Contents
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1History of aesthetics in western philosophy

2Scientific analysis of aesthetics
3Aesthetic systems
3.1Japanese aesthetics
3.2Indian aesthetics
3.3Chess aesthetics
3.4Music aesthetics
3.5Mathematical beauty
4References
5External links

History of aesthetics in western philosophy[edit]

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica

See also: History of aesthetics before the 20th century
The idea of the aesthetic developed from the idea of taste and beauty. Before the early
1700s, thinkers developed general theories of proportion and harmony, detailed most

specifically in architecture and music. An extended, philosophical reflection on aesthetics

emerged with the widening of leisure activities in the eighteenth century.[2]
In the 1700s, Edmund Burke and David Hume tried to explain aesthetic concepts such as
beauty with empirical evidence, by connecting them with typical individuals' responses.
They sought a basis for an objectivity of personal reactions. [3]
In the 1800s psychologist Wilhelm Wundt showed that interest is generally related to
complexity of stimulus. To arouse interest an object should be neither boringly simple nor
overly complex; thus complexity could be an objective measure. It is now known, for
instance, that judgments of facial beauty in humans are a matter of averageness and
symmetry.[2]
The analysis of individual experience and behavior based on experiment is a central part
of experimental aesthetics, a field founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 1800s.
Immanuel Kant insisted that aesthetic concepts are essentially subjective, but have some
objectivity since feelings of pleasure and pain can be universal responses to certain stimuli.
Recently theorists have been interested in ways that aesthetic concepts are constructed
out of social mores and practices. Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability,
economic, political, or moral value. One might judge a Lamborghinito 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. [4]
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 1960s but from
the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."
In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin, in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, argued that, in the absence of any traditional, ritualistic value, art in the age
of mechanical reproduction would inherently be based on the practice of politics. John
Berger continued in this direction with Ways of Seeing, in which he criticizes traditional
Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images.
In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published the essay The Intentional
Fallacy, in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or
"intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words
on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was
considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting. In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy,"
which served as a kind of sister essay to "The Intentional Fallacy", Wimsatt and Beardsley
also discounted the reader's personal/emotional reaction to a literary work as a valid means
of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be repudiated by theorists from the readerresponse school of literary theory. Ironically, one of the leading theorists from this
school, Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes Wimsatt and
Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970). [5]
In 1959 Frank Sibley wrote that aesthetic concepts were not rule- or condition-governed,
but required a heightened form of perception, which one might call taste, sensitivity, or
judgment.

Scientific analysis of aesthetics[edit]

Initial image of a Mandelbrot setzoom sequence with continuously

colored environment
In the 1990s, Jrgen 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. This is closely related to the principles
of algorithmic information theory andminimum description length. For
example: mathematical beauty. Another example describes an aesthetically pleasing
human face whose proportions can be described with very little information, drawing
inspiration from less detailed 15th century proportion studies by Leonardo da
Vinci and Albrecht Drer. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between what is
beauty and what is interesting, stating that the latter corresponds to the first derivative of
subjectively perceived beauty. The premise is that any observer continually tries to improve
the predictability and compressibility of the observations by discovering regularities such as
repetitions and symmetry and self-similarity.
Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity, are used for analysis in
theoretical aesthetics. The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are
influenced by processing fluency has been presented as an explanation for why beauty is
sometimes equated with truth.[6] Recent research found that people use beauty as an
indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks.[7]
Computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic
quality of images. Typically, these approaches follow a machine learning approach, where
large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to teach a computer about what
visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. The Acquine engine, developed
at Penn State University, rates natural photographs uploaded by users.[8] There have also
been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess and music. [9]
In Evolutionary aesthetics, the basic aesthetic preferences of humans are argued to be a
product of evolutionary adaptations.[10] For example, body symmetry may be valued
in physical attractiveness because it may indicate good health.

Aesthetic systems[edit]
Japanese aesthetics[edit]

Sji-ji, of the Soto Zen school

The study of Japanese aesthetics only started a little over two hundred years ago in the
West. The Japanese aesthetic is a set of ancient ideals that include ideals, and others,
underpin much of Japanese cultural and aesthetic norms on what is considered tasteful or
beautiful. While seen as a philosophy in Western societies, the concept of aesthetics in
Japan is seen as an integral part of daily life.

Indian aesthetics[edit]
Indian aesthetics evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical
states in the audience, or with representing them as symbols.

Chess aesthetics[edit]
Chess aesthetics, or beauty in chess is appreciated by both players and chess composers.
In some tournaments there are prizes for brilliancy (not just for winning a match). There are
books published featuring chess problems or puzzles that emphasize their aesthetic
aspect. Factors about a game or move sequence (also referred to as a combination that
might cause it to be regarded as 'brilliant' include: expediency, disguise, sacrifice,
correctness, preparation, paradox, unity, and originality.

Music aesthetics[edit]
In the pre-modern tradition, the aesthetics of music explored the mathematical and
cosmological dimensions of rhythmic and harmonic organization. In the eighteenth century,
focus shifted to the experience of hearing music, and thus to questions about its beauty
and human enjoyment.

Mathematical beauty[edit]
Mathematicians consider mathematical beauty to be a desirable quality in their work.
Comparisons are often made with music and poetry.

References[edit]
1.

Jump up^ "Online Etymology

Dictionary". www.etymonline.com. Retrieved 2016-02-01.
2.
^ Jump up to:a b "Aesthetics | Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy". www.iep.utm.edu. Retrieved 2016-02-01.
3.
Jump up^ "Aesthetic concepts". www.rep.routledge.com.
Retrieved 2016-02-04.
4.
Jump up^ Korsmeyer, Carolyn ed. Aesthetics: The Big
Questions 1998

5.

Jump up^ Leitch, Vincent B. , et al., eds. The Norton

Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2001.
6.
Jump up^ Reber, R, Schwarz, N, Winkielman, P:
"Processing fluency and aesthetic pleasure: Is beauty in the
perceiver's processing experience?", Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 8(4):364-382
7.
Jump up^ Reber, R, Brun, M, Mitterndorfer, K: "The use of
heuristics in intuitive mathematical judgment", Psychonomic
Bulletin & Review, 15(6):11741178
8.
Jump up^ "Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine - Instant
Impersonal Assessment of Photos". Penn State
University. Archived from the original on 9 May 2009.
Retrieved 21 June 2009.
9.
Jump up^ Manaris, B., Roos, P., Penousal, M., Krehbiel,
D., Pellicoro, L. and Romero, J.; A Corpus-Based Hybrid
Approach to Music Analysis and Composition; Proceedings of
22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07); Vancouver,
BC; 839-845 2007.
10.
Jump up^ Shimura, Arthur P.; Palmer, Stephen E.
(January 2012). Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brains,
and Experience. Oxford University Press. p. 279.

External links[edit]

Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges: Introduction to

Aesthetics