Beauty and Art

1. Beauty and Art Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

2. Aesthetics • Aesthetics: Sometimes used interchangeably with the term philosophy of art, and sometimes as a broader concept that comprises discussion of both art and of those natural phenomena that provoke appreciation of their beauty or grandeur. This field studies artistic concepts, such as art itself, representation, realism, and abstraction, and the nature of argument and judgment about goodness or badness in art.

3. Aesthetics • Philosophy of art: The branch of philosophy that studies the aesthetic features of art and the judgments about those features. • Expressionism • Formalism • Aesthetic Experience • Conventionalism

4. Aesthetics • The urge to produce art seems to be as old as the human race. • What are human beings doing when they create “art”? • Are their works frivolous or even dangerous distractions, or do they exhibit something deep and essential about human nature? • And what is the relationship between art and “reality”?

5. Aesthetics • Whatever answers exist to these questions, it is not surprising that for thousands of years people have been provoked to philosophize about art because, for better or for worse, art has been such a pervasive part of human experience.

6. Plato

7. Art and Imitation: Plato, Republic • Plato’s indictment of art, based on the metaphysics of the Divided Line. • According to Plato, art must be imitating the world as it appears, not the world as it is. • Artists imitate “particular objects.” • Art is itself must be consigned to the realm of “images” (being a copy of “particular things,” which are themselves but copies of higher things).

8. Art and Imitation • Plato says the art is “thrice removed from the truth.” • It is a copy of a copy of a copy. • Imagine a novel by someone like Charles Dickens that begins with this line: “It was a foggy day in London.” • Now, precisely what day was a foggy day? June 21, 1836? August 7, 1829?

9. Art and Imitation • Obviously, the sentence does not refer to any real day. • Strictly speaking, the sentence is false, or at least, its status has nothing to do with the truth. • Such is the case with every sentence in the novel, even those that coincidentally could correspond with the facts. (For instance, if Dickens had said, “September 26, 1782, was a foggy say in London,: we might check the records and discover that that day really was foggy, bit it wouldn’t matter to the work of art of that sentence is true).

10. Art and Imitation • It follows that works of art are what they are by virtue of being illusions. • The success of Dickens's novels depends upon his creating the illusion that he is describing real events and real people, just as the success of a realistic painting depends upon the artist’s creating the illusion that these blotches of color are clouds, mountains, houses, people, and the like.

11. Art and Imitation • So for Plato, the function of art is always to deceive. • It always draws attention away from reality (the Forms) and towards illusion (images). • Plato did not deny that an art whose function was more noble might be ontologically justifiable, but it seemed to him that almost all art was deceptive in the way just described.