petuah ini terilhami dari pengalaman pribadi penulis. bila anda ingin menyanyikan sebuah lagu, sementara lagu tersebut tidak/belum sesuai dengan range vokal anda, sebaiknya disesuaikan terlebih dahulu agar tidak membuat produksi suara anda menjadi kurang menyenangkan.
penulis pernah menyanyikan sebuah lagu yang membutuhkan suara bariton, sementara suara penulis sendiri adalah suara Bass.
hasilnya ? wallahu a'lam
Minggu, 30 Oktober 2011
Senin, 24 Oktober 2011
RBT....oh....RBT
Ring Back Tone atau yang biasa disebut dengan RBT merupakan suatu media untuk menjual sebuah karya musik secara instan, praktis dan efisien. meski beberapa seniman menganggap bahwa RBT sebuah media yang seakan tidak menghargai sebuah karya seni, karena sebuah lagu harus dipotong-potong agar dapat muat dalam durasi RBT yang tergolong singkat. namun, kehadiran RBT setidaknya mampu menambah penghasilan bagi para praktisi atau pekerja dunia musik.
menilik kasus yang saat ini marak didesas-desuskan oleh beberapa kalangan masyarakat, penulis akan menyertakan sebuah pernyataan dari Tifatul Sembiring selaku Menkominfo, beliau menulis dalam Twiiternya bahwa :
1. Saya tegaskan TIDAK ADA penghapusan layanan RBT. Tapi semua pelanggan YG MAU RBT harus register ulang. Yang TIDAK MAU, tdk boleh dipaksa
2. Jadi sistem POTONG PULSA otomatis ditiadakan. Sebab pengguna hp tidak tahu mengapa pulsanya dipotong. Hrs ditawarkan ulang mrk mau/tidak
3. Bagi penyedia jasa RBT yg baik2, tentu dibutuhkan pengguna hp dan mrk akan daftar ulang dg KESADARAN. Jadi hal ini seperti reset ulang sj
4. Semua cp harus memudahkan proses UNREG, dan pelanggan hrs mengerti betul semua resikonya jika melakukan REG.
5. Pemotongan pulsa tanpa seizin/sepengetahuan pemilik hp adalah PENCURIAN, akan sgr diusut pihak kepolisian sebagai aparat penegak hukum.
Semua point di atas diambil dari akun twitter Tifatul Sembiring
menilik kasus yang saat ini marak didesas-desuskan oleh beberapa kalangan masyarakat, penulis akan menyertakan sebuah pernyataan dari Tifatul Sembiring selaku Menkominfo, beliau menulis dalam Twiiternya bahwa :
1. Saya tegaskan TIDAK ADA penghapusan layanan RBT. Tapi semua pelanggan YG MAU RBT harus register ulang. Yang TIDAK MAU, tdk boleh dipaksa
2. Jadi sistem POTONG PULSA otomatis ditiadakan. Sebab pengguna hp tidak tahu mengapa pulsanya dipotong. Hrs ditawarkan ulang mrk mau/tidak
3. Bagi penyedia jasa RBT yg baik2, tentu dibutuhkan pengguna hp dan mrk akan daftar ulang dg KESADARAN. Jadi hal ini seperti reset ulang sj
4. Semua cp harus memudahkan proses UNREG, dan pelanggan hrs mengerti betul semua resikonya jika melakukan REG.
5. Pemotongan pulsa tanpa seizin/sepengetahuan pemilik hp adalah PENCURIAN, akan sgr diusut pihak kepolisian sebagai aparat penegak hukum.
Semua point di atas diambil dari akun twitter Tifatul Sembiring
Senin, 01 Agustus 2011
Musik Ramadhan : tradisi positif musisi Indonesia
para musisi, khususnya dari kalangan muslimin, juga tak ketinggalan menyemarakkan bulan Ramadhan dengan menyajikan lagu-lagu bernuansa religi. seperti halnya kita tahu bahwa musik merupakan salah satu hiburan yang paling diminati oleh masyarakat, sehingga tak heran bila antusias masyarakat dalam menyambut bulan Ramadhan dapat ditanggapi dengan baik oleh para musisi di negeri kita.
sejumlah nama yang kerapkali menyajikan musik religi di bulan suci adalah Gigi, Ungu, Tompi, dll. sementara di tahun ini, beberapa musisi pendatang barupun juga turut meramaikan ajang lagu religi di bulan Ramadhan seperti Syahrini,S9mbilan Band, dan lain sebagainya.
adanya lagu -lagu bernuansa religi tersebut memang dapat menjadi "Oase" bagi masyarakat agar dapat lebih menghayati berkah dan kebaikan dari bulan suci ini, terlebih dapat mendekatkan sang musisi yang bersangkutan agar dapat mengingat kembali nilai-nilai keagamaan yang mungkin telah jauh dari kehidupannya selama menjalani aktivitasnya sebagai selebriti.
kehadiran lagu-lagu religi di bulan Ramadhan menunjukkan bahwa para musisi Indonesia tetap tidak terlepas dari nilai-nilai agama. sekalipun kehidupan para musisi khususnya, dan para artis pada umumnya, notabene sangat jauh dari kesan religiusitas, namun kesan itu begitu tampak pada bulan ini.
hal itu memang sepertinya agak janggal, namun telah menjadi sesuatu yang lumrah. karena di satu saat mereka terkesan begitu Islami, tapi di saat lainnya mereka lepas dari nilai Islam. mereka seakan mencampuradukkan antara hak dan batil.
bagaimanapun, setidaknya mereka tetap menghargai bulan suci ini dengan menyuguhkan lagu-lagu religi tersebut.
semoga musik religi yang mereka suguhkan dapat menjadi amal kebaikan bagi mereka serta bagi para pendengarnya.
terus berkarya untuk Indonesia !!!
Senin, 25 Juli 2011
musisi legendaris Andy Tielman
ANdy Tielman merupakan sosok yang brilian, legendaris sekaligus agak naif. hal ini dikarenakan kiprahnya di dunia musik era 50an memang mampu menembus pasar musik internasional, tapi ia justru tidak terlalu dikenali di negaranya sendiri. Bahkan hingga saat ini, hanya sedikit yang mengenali dan mengagumi gitaris jenius tersebut.
padahal, sumbangsihnya dalam perkembangan dunia musik dunia sangat berarti. ia adalah orang pertama yang memperkenalkan atraksi bergitar, yaitu suatu permainan gitar dengan berbagai tehnik hingga membuat penonton berdecak kagum. ia adalah gitaris pertama yang memperkenalkan tehnik tapping, ia juga gitaris pertama yang memperkenalkan permainan gitar di belakang punggung, serta tehnik-tehnik lainnya yang telah banyak dipakai oleh para gitaris di seluruh dunia.
sebagai rakyat Indonesia, seharusnya kita bangga dan memberi apresiasi yang tinggi terhadap gitaris jenius kita yang satu ini, seharusnya media massa lebih sering meliput gitaris ini sebagai tanda penghargaan mereka. seharusnya pemerintah juga mengapresiasi terhadap kiprahnya yang begitu berhgarga di tanah air, bahkan di dunia internasional.
Kamis, 21 Juli 2011
MUSISI, PENGAMAT MUSIK, DAN PENDENGAR
Oleh : muse_sic
Hasil karya seorang musisi akan diapresiasi oleh pengamat music dan pendengar, hal itu merupakan sesuatu yang lumrah dalam setiap munculnya karya music. Kehadiran seorang pengamat music dan pendengar bagi seorang musisi cukup penting. Karya music yang tidak dinikmati maupun diapresiasi oleh pendengar dan pengamat music akan menjadi sia-sia.
Hubungan yang terjalin antara musisi, pengamat music, dan pendengar adalah sebagaimana yang terjalin dalam hubungan komunikasi, di mana musisi berperan sebagai komunikator dan pengamat music serta pendengar berperan sebagai komunikan sekaligus sebagai penyampai feedback yang akan diterima oleh musisi.
Itulah sebabnya kajian tentang pengamat music dan pendengar juga merupakan sesuatu yang penting dalam pembahasan mengenai dunia music.
MUSISI DAN PENGAMAT MUSIK
Pengamat music sebagai seorang pendengar yang mengapresiasi karya music berdasarkan pengetahuan dan pengalamannya dalam bidang music. Sehingga apresiasi yang dilakukannya terhadap sebuah karya musik benar-benar baik dan dapat dijadikan acuan.
Seorang pengamat music tidak harus berasal dari kaum musisi, ia dapat pula berasal dari orang-orang yang berkecimpung dalam karier lainnya tapi tetap berhubungan dengan dunia music. Misalnya, redaktur majalah musik. Meskipun ia hanyalah seorang redaktur majalah, namun majalah yang ditanganinya adalah majalah di bidang seni music. Sehingga secara otomatis redaktur tersebut akan bersinggungan dan berinteraksi dengan dunia music secara empiric maupun teoritis.
Contoh lainnya adalah penyiar radio. Seorang penyiar radio memang tidak berkecimpung dalam dunia music professional, namun selama ia melakukan tugasnya sebagai penyiar, ia akan selalu bersinggungan dan berinteraksi dengan karya-karya music dari berbagai jenis dan aliran.
Hiburan utama bagi sebuah stasiun radio adalah music, maka tidak heran bila kebanyakan dari stasiun radio professional mewajibkan para penyiarnya agar “Melek Musik” yang berarti dapat mengenal dan menilai beragam jenis music, serta perbendaharaan lagu—baik lagu lama hingga lagu yang up-to date. Sehingga tidak mengherankan bila seorang penyiar dapat mengapresiasi sebuah karya music dengan baik.
Seorang pengamat music dari berbagai kalangan tersebut, akan mampu memberikan kritik dan masukan terhadap sebuah karya music secara akurat. Mereka bahkan tidak hanya mengamati sebuah karya dari segi intrinsic, segi ekstrinsikpun juga tidak luput dari pengamatannya.
Oleh karena itu, para musisi—seharusnya— dapat berterima kasih kepada para pengamat music apabila karya mereka diapresiasi, karena kritikan dan masukan dari mereka merupakan sesuatu yang berharga bagi perkembangan kinerja mereka di dunia musik.
MUSISI DAN PENDENGAR
pendengar music bersifat heterogen, akan tetapi dapat dikategorikan menjadi 2 jenis :
1. Pendengar awam
2. Pendengar kompeten
Pendengar awam adalah para pendengar music yang berasal dari kalangan masyarakat yang masih awam terhadap dunia music. Mereka mendengarkan music umumnya hanya bertujuan untuk menikmati saja. Kalaupun mereka mencoba untuk mengapresiasi sebuah karya music, apresiasi mereka tidak atau kurang baik. Karena, sekali lagi, mereka tergolong awam dalam bidang music.
Pendengar awam biasanya lebih suka terhadap music-musik yang easy listening, musisi yang mereka kenalpun biasanya hanya musisi-musisi komersil. Sementara musisi-musisi non komersil, tidak atau sedikit saja yang mereka kenal.
Pendengar kompeten adalah kebalikan dari pendengar awam. Pendengar jenis ini umumnya berasal dari golongan yang berkaitan dengan dunia music, seperti : musisi (amatir&professional), murid dan pengajar sekolah music, pelanggan majalah music, awak media music, penyiar radio, wartawan entertainment, dsb.
Karena pendengar kompeten telah memiliki pengetahuan yang memadai dalam mengapresiasi sebuah karya music, sehingga tidak menutup kemungkinan pendengar jenis ini dapat menjadi pengamat music atau bahkan seorang musisi. Karena itu, apresiasi yang dilakukan pendengar jenis inipun sangat baik.
Hasil karya seorang musisi akan diapresiasi oleh pengamat music dan pendengar, hal itu merupakan sesuatu yang lumrah dalam setiap munculnya karya music. Kehadiran seorang pengamat music dan pendengar bagi seorang musisi cukup penting. Karya music yang tidak dinikmati maupun diapresiasi oleh pendengar dan pengamat music akan menjadi sia-sia.
Hubungan yang terjalin antara musisi, pengamat music, dan pendengar adalah sebagaimana yang terjalin dalam hubungan komunikasi, di mana musisi berperan sebagai komunikator dan pengamat music serta pendengar berperan sebagai komunikan sekaligus sebagai penyampai feedback yang akan diterima oleh musisi.
Itulah sebabnya kajian tentang pengamat music dan pendengar juga merupakan sesuatu yang penting dalam pembahasan mengenai dunia music.
MUSISI DAN PENGAMAT MUSIK
Pengamat music sebagai seorang pendengar yang mengapresiasi karya music berdasarkan pengetahuan dan pengalamannya dalam bidang music. Sehingga apresiasi yang dilakukannya terhadap sebuah karya musik benar-benar baik dan dapat dijadikan acuan.
Seorang pengamat music tidak harus berasal dari kaum musisi, ia dapat pula berasal dari orang-orang yang berkecimpung dalam karier lainnya tapi tetap berhubungan dengan dunia music. Misalnya, redaktur majalah musik. Meskipun ia hanyalah seorang redaktur majalah, namun majalah yang ditanganinya adalah majalah di bidang seni music. Sehingga secara otomatis redaktur tersebut akan bersinggungan dan berinteraksi dengan dunia music secara empiric maupun teoritis.
Contoh lainnya adalah penyiar radio. Seorang penyiar radio memang tidak berkecimpung dalam dunia music professional, namun selama ia melakukan tugasnya sebagai penyiar, ia akan selalu bersinggungan dan berinteraksi dengan karya-karya music dari berbagai jenis dan aliran.
Hiburan utama bagi sebuah stasiun radio adalah music, maka tidak heran bila kebanyakan dari stasiun radio professional mewajibkan para penyiarnya agar “Melek Musik” yang berarti dapat mengenal dan menilai beragam jenis music, serta perbendaharaan lagu—baik lagu lama hingga lagu yang up-to date. Sehingga tidak mengherankan bila seorang penyiar dapat mengapresiasi sebuah karya music dengan baik.
Seorang pengamat music dari berbagai kalangan tersebut, akan mampu memberikan kritik dan masukan terhadap sebuah karya music secara akurat. Mereka bahkan tidak hanya mengamati sebuah karya dari segi intrinsic, segi ekstrinsikpun juga tidak luput dari pengamatannya.
Oleh karena itu, para musisi—seharusnya— dapat berterima kasih kepada para pengamat music apabila karya mereka diapresiasi, karena kritikan dan masukan dari mereka merupakan sesuatu yang berharga bagi perkembangan kinerja mereka di dunia musik.
MUSISI DAN PENDENGAR
pendengar music bersifat heterogen, akan tetapi dapat dikategorikan menjadi 2 jenis :
1. Pendengar awam
2. Pendengar kompeten
Pendengar awam adalah para pendengar music yang berasal dari kalangan masyarakat yang masih awam terhadap dunia music. Mereka mendengarkan music umumnya hanya bertujuan untuk menikmati saja. Kalaupun mereka mencoba untuk mengapresiasi sebuah karya music, apresiasi mereka tidak atau kurang baik. Karena, sekali lagi, mereka tergolong awam dalam bidang music.
Pendengar awam biasanya lebih suka terhadap music-musik yang easy listening, musisi yang mereka kenalpun biasanya hanya musisi-musisi komersil. Sementara musisi-musisi non komersil, tidak atau sedikit saja yang mereka kenal.
Pendengar kompeten adalah kebalikan dari pendengar awam. Pendengar jenis ini umumnya berasal dari golongan yang berkaitan dengan dunia music, seperti : musisi (amatir&professional), murid dan pengajar sekolah music, pelanggan majalah music, awak media music, penyiar radio, wartawan entertainment, dsb.
Karena pendengar kompeten telah memiliki pengetahuan yang memadai dalam mengapresiasi sebuah karya music, sehingga tidak menutup kemungkinan pendengar jenis ini dapat menjadi pengamat music atau bahkan seorang musisi. Karena itu, apresiasi yang dilakukan pendengar jenis inipun sangat baik.
"EUPHORIA" BOYBAND INDONESIA
oleh : muse_sic
Bila kita membahas tentang musik pop, kita tidak dapat menjauh dari trend. Bila pasar musik sedang booming lagu-lagu bernuansa mellow, maka lahirlah lagu-lagu cinta picisan dengan irama dan melodi yang serba romantis. Namun bila pasar musik telah jenuh, maka beralihlah menuju warna musik yang baru dan menjual. Semua tergantung pada keinginan pasar.
Geliat musik komersial (baca : Pop) di tanah air kini telah beralih pada fenomena munculnya boyband-boyband baru yang meramaikan dunia musik Indonesia, serta seakan mencoba menyaingi era grup band yang hingga kini masih mendominasi.
Sejak melejitnya nama Smash sebagai ikon reinkarnasi boyband, muncul juga nama-nama boyband baru hingga muncul pula sekelompok gadis yang bergaya dan bernyanyi selayaknya boyband, 7Icon, dan seringkali disebut sebagai girlband.
Bila menilik sejarah boyband di Indonesia, terdapat sejumlah nama seperti Trio Libels, Cool Colours, Coboy, hingga M.E. yang mendominasi musik Indonesia di era 90-an.
Dalam pengamatan penulis selama ini, boyband Indonesia dari masa ke masa lebih cenderung mengutamakan segi visual daripada segi audio. Mereka lebih menonjol dari segi wajah serta dancing (performance), namun dalam segi kualitas musik seperti aransemen dan tehnik vocal hanya sedikit yang benar-benar menguasainya dengan baik.
Fenomena berkembangnya era boyband di Indonesia yang lebih menekankan pada segi penampilan visual semata, adalah sesuatu yang sedikit ganjil tapi telah menjadi sesuatu yang lumrah di dunia musik. Karena sebagai seorang (atau kelompok) yang berkarier di dunia musik, alangkah lebih baiknya bila boyband dapat menyuguhkan karya yang lebih menekankan pada nilai audio dan bukan hanya pada kekuatan visual semata. Bagaimanapun musik adalah seni pendengaran, bukan seni penglihatan.
Coba kita menilik sebuah boyband Amerika, N’Sync. Mereka dapat dijadikan acuan yang baik bagi para boyband di Indonesia maupun dunia.
N’sync tidak hanya jago bergoyang-goyang di atas panggung, tapi kekuatan vocal dari tiap personilnya pun patut diacungi jempol. Lihat saja bagaimana lagu Pop dari boyband tersebut diaransemen, mereka mengetengahkan nuansa musik dance yang kental, disisipi dengan tehnik acapella, serta diakhiri dengan tehnik beatbox dari salah seorang personil mereka, Justin Timberlake( kini ia telah bersolo karier).
Meskipun kini mereka tidak lagi terdengar,namun sepak terjang mereka setidaknya dapat dijadikan “Suri Teladan” bagi boyband masa kini.
Boyband Indonesia masa kini terkesan terlalu mengikuti gaya boyband Korea. Saya pun membayangkan, kapankah akan lahir boyband yang mempunyai karakter atau ciri khas Indonesia ?
Bila kita membahas tentang musik pop, kita tidak dapat menjauh dari trend. Bila pasar musik sedang booming lagu-lagu bernuansa mellow, maka lahirlah lagu-lagu cinta picisan dengan irama dan melodi yang serba romantis. Namun bila pasar musik telah jenuh, maka beralihlah menuju warna musik yang baru dan menjual. Semua tergantung pada keinginan pasar.
Geliat musik komersial (baca : Pop) di tanah air kini telah beralih pada fenomena munculnya boyband-boyband baru yang meramaikan dunia musik Indonesia, serta seakan mencoba menyaingi era grup band yang hingga kini masih mendominasi.
Sejak melejitnya nama Smash sebagai ikon reinkarnasi boyband, muncul juga nama-nama boyband baru hingga muncul pula sekelompok gadis yang bergaya dan bernyanyi selayaknya boyband, 7Icon, dan seringkali disebut sebagai girlband.
Bila menilik sejarah boyband di Indonesia, terdapat sejumlah nama seperti Trio Libels, Cool Colours, Coboy, hingga M.E. yang mendominasi musik Indonesia di era 90-an.
Dalam pengamatan penulis selama ini, boyband Indonesia dari masa ke masa lebih cenderung mengutamakan segi visual daripada segi audio. Mereka lebih menonjol dari segi wajah serta dancing (performance), namun dalam segi kualitas musik seperti aransemen dan tehnik vocal hanya sedikit yang benar-benar menguasainya dengan baik.
Fenomena berkembangnya era boyband di Indonesia yang lebih menekankan pada segi penampilan visual semata, adalah sesuatu yang sedikit ganjil tapi telah menjadi sesuatu yang lumrah di dunia musik. Karena sebagai seorang (atau kelompok) yang berkarier di dunia musik, alangkah lebih baiknya bila boyband dapat menyuguhkan karya yang lebih menekankan pada nilai audio dan bukan hanya pada kekuatan visual semata. Bagaimanapun musik adalah seni pendengaran, bukan seni penglihatan.
Coba kita menilik sebuah boyband Amerika, N’Sync. Mereka dapat dijadikan acuan yang baik bagi para boyband di Indonesia maupun dunia.
N’sync tidak hanya jago bergoyang-goyang di atas panggung, tapi kekuatan vocal dari tiap personilnya pun patut diacungi jempol. Lihat saja bagaimana lagu Pop dari boyband tersebut diaransemen, mereka mengetengahkan nuansa musik dance yang kental, disisipi dengan tehnik acapella, serta diakhiri dengan tehnik beatbox dari salah seorang personil mereka, Justin Timberlake( kini ia telah bersolo karier).
Meskipun kini mereka tidak lagi terdengar,namun sepak terjang mereka setidaknya dapat dijadikan “Suri Teladan” bagi boyband masa kini.
Boyband Indonesia masa kini terkesan terlalu mengikuti gaya boyband Korea. Saya pun membayangkan, kapankah akan lahir boyband yang mempunyai karakter atau ciri khas Indonesia ?
FUNGSI SENI MUSIK BAGI KEHIDUPAN
oleh : muse_sic
Kehidupan manusia dari jaman pra sejarah hingga era infromasi seperti saat ini tak dapat lepas dari eksistensi kesenian sebagai sebuah media keindahan, hiburan, hingga media komunikasi yang cukup efektif.
Munculnya berbagai disiplin kesenian merupakan suatu cermin bagi perkembangan peradaban kebudayaan manusia, karena seni merupakan salah satu hasil budaya manusia.
Kesenian pun lahir dengan beragam ketegori yang kesemuanya dapat diangkap dan dinikmati oleh tiap indera ; seni gerak, seni musik, seni lukis, seni pahat, seni patung, seni peran, seni sastra, dsb. Dan kesemuanya memiliki fungsi dan peran yang berbeda bagi kehidupan manusia, namun juga memiliki sisi kesamaan.
Seni musik sebagai salah satu cabang seni, juga memiliki fungsi yang cukup penting bagi peradaban dan kehidupan manusia.
Seni musik bila ditinjau dari perannya sebgai media komunikasi, maka seni musik memiliki kesamaan fungsi dengan media komunikasi lainnya, seperti :
1. menghibur
2. mendidik
3. menginformasikan
4. kontrol social
seni musik memiliki fungsi sebagai media penghibur, merupakan fungsi yang paling mendasar dan paling diminati oleh umat manusia. Karena seni musik dapat menjadi media untuk menghilangkan rasa jenuh, kepenatan, dan perasan negative lainnya hingga dapat tersalur ke arah yang lebih positif.
Peran seni musik sebagai media pendidik dapat kita lihat dalam lirik-lirik lagu edukatif yang sering diajarkan oleh para guru TK dan SD di sekolah. Lagu-lagu seperti Pelangi dll dapat mengajarkan para siswa untuk dapat mengenali dan mengagumi kebesaran Tuhan atas ciptaannya. Hal tersebut merupakan salah satu contoh yang mudah kita temui.
Contoh lainnya dapat pula kita lihat dari lagu-lagu nasyid (baca : Religius Islami). Lagu-lagu nasyid secara eksplisit mengarahkan para pendengarnya kepada Sang Pencipta dengan alunan lagu dan rangkaian lirik yang indah dan memikat.
Salah satu lagu nasyid yang begitu terkenal adalah lagu Astaghfirullah dari Opick yang mampu mendidik para pendengarnya agar tidak lalai dalam menjalani kehidupannya.
Seni musik sebagai media informasi berarti memberi informasi tentang suatu hal kepada para pendengarnya. Media informasi ini tidak hanya tentang suatu peristiwa sebagaimana sebuah berita di koran dan televisi, melainkan juga informasi tentang kehidupan cinta, kehidupan sosial, kehidupan religi, politik, hukum, dan lain sebagainya.
Meskipun informasi yang disampaikan melalui seni musik tidak vulgar, dan umumnya tersampaikan secara kiasan, tapi hal itu justru dapat menjadi wadah tersendiri bagi para kaum intelektual yang ingin menyuarakan pemikiran dan isi hatinya di saat kaum penguasa melakukan represi terhadap media informasi formal.
Sebagai misal, lagu karya Iwan Fals yang berjudul Bento adalah suatu keinginan Iwan Fals dalam menginformasikan tentang penguasa yang lalim dan otoriter kepada para pendengarnya. Begitu juga lagu Pak Tua dari Elpamas yang bertema hampir sama.
Seni musik sebagai media kontrol sosial memang tak dapat disangkal. Masyarakat saat ini begitu menggandrungi dunia musik, media massa baik elektronik maupun cetak hampir setiap harinya menyajikan konser musik dan pemberitaan seputar dunia musik. Sehingga secara otomatis, seni musik merupakan media kontrol sosial atau media yang mampu mempengaruhi kehidupan sosial masyarakat secara efektif.
Lirik lagu, aransemen musik, gaya musisi di atas panggung, hingga mode pakaian yang dikenakan para musisinya dapat menjadi trendsetter hingga ditiru oleh para penggemarnya.
Apakah seni musik yang disajikan dapat memberi pengaruh positif atau negatif bagi masyarakat? hal itu tergantung pada para musisinya.
Selain memiliki fungsi sebagaimana media komunikasi, seni musik juga memiliki fungsi dalam dunia kedokteran. Terbukti beberapa jenis musik dapat menjadi terapi yang efektif bagi penyembuhan seorang pasien, serta meningkatkan kecerdasan.
Musik klasik, merupakan salah satu contohnya. Musik klasik, terutama karya-karya Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, dapat meningkatkan kecerdasan anak dan balita. Itulah sebabnya para pakar kedokteran menganjurkan bagi ibu hamil agar memperdengarkan musik klasik Mozart saat bayi masih berada dalam kandungan. Hal ini umumnya disebut sebagai pendidikan pre-Natal, atau pendidikan sebelum kelahiran.
Begitu beragamnya fungsi seni musik dalam kehidupan, sehingga para musisi sebaiknya dapat menciptakan karya-karya yang bermanfaat, tidak hanya mengatasnamakan komersialisasi atau sekedar media penghibur semata.
Apabila menilik dari hadits rasulullah SAW, “Sebaik-baik manusia adalah manusia yang paling bermanfaat bagi manusia lainnya.” Maka penulis dapat menyimpulkan, “Sebaik-baik seni musik adalah musik yang paling bermanfaat bagi pendengarnya.” He..he..
Wallahu a’lamu bisshowaab
Munculnya berbagai disiplin kesenian merupakan suatu cermin bagi perkembangan peradaban kebudayaan manusia, karena seni merupakan salah satu hasil budaya manusia.
Kesenian pun lahir dengan beragam ketegori yang kesemuanya dapat diangkap dan dinikmati oleh tiap indera ; seni gerak, seni musik, seni lukis, seni pahat, seni patung, seni peran, seni sastra, dsb. Dan kesemuanya memiliki fungsi dan peran yang berbeda bagi kehidupan manusia, namun juga memiliki sisi kesamaan.
Seni musik sebagai salah satu cabang seni, juga memiliki fungsi yang cukup penting bagi peradaban dan kehidupan manusia.
Seni musik bila ditinjau dari perannya sebgai media komunikasi, maka seni musik memiliki kesamaan fungsi dengan media komunikasi lainnya, seperti :
1. menghibur
2. mendidik
3. menginformasikan
4. kontrol social
seni musik memiliki fungsi sebagai media penghibur, merupakan fungsi yang paling mendasar dan paling diminati oleh umat manusia. Karena seni musik dapat menjadi media untuk menghilangkan rasa jenuh, kepenatan, dan perasan negative lainnya hingga dapat tersalur ke arah yang lebih positif.
Peran seni musik sebagai media pendidik dapat kita lihat dalam lirik-lirik lagu edukatif yang sering diajarkan oleh para guru TK dan SD di sekolah. Lagu-lagu seperti Pelangi dll dapat mengajarkan para siswa untuk dapat mengenali dan mengagumi kebesaran Tuhan atas ciptaannya. Hal tersebut merupakan salah satu contoh yang mudah kita temui.
Contoh lainnya dapat pula kita lihat dari lagu-lagu nasyid (baca : Religius Islami). Lagu-lagu nasyid secara eksplisit mengarahkan para pendengarnya kepada Sang Pencipta dengan alunan lagu dan rangkaian lirik yang indah dan memikat.
Salah satu lagu nasyid yang begitu terkenal adalah lagu Astaghfirullah dari Opick yang mampu mendidik para pendengarnya agar tidak lalai dalam menjalani kehidupannya.
Seni musik sebagai media informasi berarti memberi informasi tentang suatu hal kepada para pendengarnya. Media informasi ini tidak hanya tentang suatu peristiwa sebagaimana sebuah berita di koran dan televisi, melainkan juga informasi tentang kehidupan cinta, kehidupan sosial, kehidupan religi, politik, hukum, dan lain sebagainya.
Meskipun informasi yang disampaikan melalui seni musik tidak vulgar, dan umumnya tersampaikan secara kiasan, tapi hal itu justru dapat menjadi wadah tersendiri bagi para kaum intelektual yang ingin menyuarakan pemikiran dan isi hatinya di saat kaum penguasa melakukan represi terhadap media informasi formal.
Sebagai misal, lagu karya Iwan Fals yang berjudul Bento adalah suatu keinginan Iwan Fals dalam menginformasikan tentang penguasa yang lalim dan otoriter kepada para pendengarnya. Begitu juga lagu Pak Tua dari Elpamas yang bertema hampir sama.
Seni musik sebagai media kontrol sosial memang tak dapat disangkal. Masyarakat saat ini begitu menggandrungi dunia musik, media massa baik elektronik maupun cetak hampir setiap harinya menyajikan konser musik dan pemberitaan seputar dunia musik. Sehingga secara otomatis, seni musik merupakan media kontrol sosial atau media yang mampu mempengaruhi kehidupan sosial masyarakat secara efektif.
Lirik lagu, aransemen musik, gaya musisi di atas panggung, hingga mode pakaian yang dikenakan para musisinya dapat menjadi trendsetter hingga ditiru oleh para penggemarnya.
Apakah seni musik yang disajikan dapat memberi pengaruh positif atau negatif bagi masyarakat? hal itu tergantung pada para musisinya.
Selain memiliki fungsi sebagaimana media komunikasi, seni musik juga memiliki fungsi dalam dunia kedokteran. Terbukti beberapa jenis musik dapat menjadi terapi yang efektif bagi penyembuhan seorang pasien, serta meningkatkan kecerdasan.
Musik klasik, merupakan salah satu contohnya. Musik klasik, terutama karya-karya Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, dapat meningkatkan kecerdasan anak dan balita. Itulah sebabnya para pakar kedokteran menganjurkan bagi ibu hamil agar memperdengarkan musik klasik Mozart saat bayi masih berada dalam kandungan. Hal ini umumnya disebut sebagai pendidikan pre-Natal, atau pendidikan sebelum kelahiran.
Begitu beragamnya fungsi seni musik dalam kehidupan, sehingga para musisi sebaiknya dapat menciptakan karya-karya yang bermanfaat, tidak hanya mengatasnamakan komersialisasi atau sekedar media penghibur semata.
Apabila menilik dari hadits rasulullah SAW, “Sebaik-baik manusia adalah manusia yang paling bermanfaat bagi manusia lainnya.” Maka penulis dapat menyimpulkan, “Sebaik-baik seni musik adalah musik yang paling bermanfaat bagi pendengarnya.” He..he..
Wallahu a’lamu bisshowaab
Minggu, 17 Juli 2011
Music and emotion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Many scientific disciplines deal with the topic of music and emotion, including philosophy, musicology and psychology. The perspective presented here is mainly a psychological one, yet some theoretical and philosophical considerations will be made to clarify prevailing concepts about music and emotions and how they can be connected.
We don’t find it hard to explain why and how we respond emotionally to something expressing an emotion, e.g. a person expressing joy or sadness (or indirectly to an event like an earthquake that affects people as to express an emotion, which ends up being the same). A stone rarely moves us to tears, so why would music do that? Thus, the core of this problem is the question how music can be expressive at all. This problem is examined by the field of aesthetics.
Why does something (that is not a person) appear sad? Because we can identify in its structure certain characteristics that we know from a person’s expression of sadness. We would sometimes call an old hunchbacked lady sad (although we don’t doubt that she might feel completely differently) because she looks like someone sad we’ve already seen. In the same way we would call a piece of music sad because its dynamic character resembles a person’s expression of sadness. “The resemblance that counts most for music’s expressiveness […] is between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behaviour associated with the expression of emotion.”[3] If a person does not give verbal account of his or her feelings , the observer can still note them from the person’s posture, gait, gestures, attitude, and comportment. Music recalls an appearance of sadness e.g., according to Davies, by a slow and quiet downward movement, underlying patterns of unresolved tension, dark timbre , heavy or thick harmonic bass textures.[4]
Not everybody associates the same musical features with the same emotion. Appearance emotionalism does not claim that movement in music generally resembles human behaviour but that many listeners have this perception of similarity, and that this is the crucial connection that constitutes the expressiveness of music. This perception of similarity can be widely common among listeners or highly individual. Which musical features are more commonly associated with certain emotions is left over to the testing of music psychology (see next paragraph). Davies claims that expressiveness is an objective property of music and not subjective in the sense of being projected into the music by the listener. Music’s expressiveness is certainly response-dependent, i.e. it is realized in the listener’s judgement. However, suitably skilled listeners display a high degree of agreement in attributing emotional expressiveness to a certain piece of music. Although this is an empirical finding, it indicates according to Davies (2006) that the expressiveness of music has to be somewhat objective. If there was no expressiveness in the music, no expression could be projected into it as a reaction to the music.
Some researchers believe that an emotion is a mental state of a being. Scherer [5] argues that emotion is a “hypothetical construct” (p. 240) which consists of a number of parts including physiological arousal , motor expression, subjective feeling, behaviour preparation and cognitive processes. Some researchers believe that in order to scientifically examine the phenomenon of emotions it may be necessary to identify such components and define variables that are measurable. The following list of components and processes is oriented at Patrik Juslin’s [6] framework of “mechanisms” that some researchers believe lead to emotions induced by music are as follows but there is much debate about these unscientifically justified notions:
A. by taking over certain aspects of physiological arousal through proprioception (see paragraph above). Cf. William James[8]
Still, emotions elicited by music have some characteristics that make them different from real-life emotions. Coming back to the example of the piano concerto, the sadness felt at hearing it does not only lack the regret of the sadness at the death of a loved person, but it is also certainly less intense. There seem to be emotional intensities of real-life events that the experience of an artwork cannot reach. In addition, most emotions, particularly the negative ones, felt when listening to music seem to have a positive tinge. Why do we seek the experience of a negative emotion as in a sad piece of music? One reason is that we appreciate, in an artistic, aesthetic way, the music as an artwork that manages to create the expressiveness. Another reason is given by Kendall Walton (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/): Sadness is not negative in itself. Rather the life situation that causes it, e.g. the death of a loved person, is negative. “Thus, though we would not seek out the death of a loved one, given the death we ‘welcome’ the sorrow.” Music gives the listener the possibility of self-experience through real emotions, without the consequences of real-life circumstances, just as any art and play does.
Many scientific disciplines deal with the topic of music and emotion, including philosophy, musicology and psychology. The perspective presented here is mainly a psychological one, yet some theoretical and philosophical considerations will be made to clarify prevailing concepts about music and emotions and how they can be connected.
Expressiveness of music – philosophical problems
Claiming that music is expressive of emotions and that it can elicit emotions in the listener does not seem highly disputable at first glance. However, this claim gives rise to a number of questions.- How can a piece of music (when we consider purely instrumental music without any vocals, text or title) appear emotional, as a piece of music is no psychological agent?
- Why would we respond emotionally to music knowing that there is nobody undergoing the emotion expressed?
- What are psychological mechanisms that lead to the emotional reaction in the listener?
- What is the nature of these emotions?
We don’t find it hard to explain why and how we respond emotionally to something expressing an emotion, e.g. a person expressing joy or sadness (or indirectly to an event like an earthquake that affects people as to express an emotion, which ends up being the same). A stone rarely moves us to tears, so why would music do that? Thus, the core of this problem is the question how music can be expressive at all. This problem is examined by the field of aesthetics.
[edit] Appearance emotionalism
Two of the most influential philosophers in the aesthetics of music are Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson.[1] Without going into the depths of the philosophical argument, this view mainly follows Davies’[2] position. He terms his concept the expressiveness of emotions in music appearance emotionalism. Appearance emotionalism holds that music is for example sad in the same way the posture of a person is sad or a weeping willow is sad. A piece of music is not sad because it feels sadness, but because it expresses sadness, it is sad in appearance.Why does something (that is not a person) appear sad? Because we can identify in its structure certain characteristics that we know from a person’s expression of sadness. We would sometimes call an old hunchbacked lady sad (although we don’t doubt that she might feel completely differently) because she looks like someone sad we’ve already seen. In the same way we would call a piece of music sad because its dynamic character resembles a person’s expression of sadness. “The resemblance that counts most for music’s expressiveness […] is between music’s temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behaviour associated with the expression of emotion.”[3] If a person does not give verbal account of his or her feelings , the observer can still note them from the person’s posture, gait, gestures, attitude, and comportment. Music recalls an appearance of sadness e.g., according to Davies, by a slow and quiet downward movement, underlying patterns of unresolved tension, dark timbre , heavy or thick harmonic bass textures.[4]
Not everybody associates the same musical features with the same emotion. Appearance emotionalism does not claim that movement in music generally resembles human behaviour but that many listeners have this perception of similarity, and that this is the crucial connection that constitutes the expressiveness of music. This perception of similarity can be widely common among listeners or highly individual. Which musical features are more commonly associated with certain emotions is left over to the testing of music psychology (see next paragraph). Davies claims that expressiveness is an objective property of music and not subjective in the sense of being projected into the music by the listener. Music’s expressiveness is certainly response-dependent, i.e. it is realized in the listener’s judgement. However, suitably skilled listeners display a high degree of agreement in attributing emotional expressiveness to a certain piece of music. Although this is an empirical finding, it indicates according to Davies (2006) that the expressiveness of music has to be somewhat objective. If there was no expressiveness in the music, no expression could be projected into it as a reaction to the music.
[edit] Psychological mechanisms involved in emotions elicited by music
Looking at the various components of emotional responses to music and the related brain processes may explain why listener’s responses to music are sometimes identical – and which responses may be different.Some researchers believe that an emotion is a mental state of a being. Scherer [5] argues that emotion is a “hypothetical construct” (p. 240) which consists of a number of parts including physiological arousal , motor expression, subjective feeling, behaviour preparation and cognitive processes. Some researchers believe that in order to scientifically examine the phenomenon of emotions it may be necessary to identify such components and define variables that are measurable. The following list of components and processes is oriented at Patrik Juslin’s [6] framework of “mechanisms” that some researchers believe lead to emotions induced by music are as follows but there is much debate about these unscientifically justified notions:
[edit] Physiological arousal
- changes in heart rate, breathing frequency, temperature sensation
- part of the body’s “warning system” for important/urgent events or danger; auditory criteria: fast, loud, very low/high pitched, dissonant
- e.g. dissonance as an aspect in warning calls
- equally: relaxing effects of music
- brain stem reflexes: early turnoffs from the auditory pathway
- influences the pleasantness of a piece of music, but may also affect a person’s subjective/cognitive evaluation of a piece of through proprioceptive feedback[7]
- listeners try to establish an “optimal arousal level” depending on the situation (e.g. Rave vs. candlelight dinner) and personality characteristics
[edit] Emotional contagion
mimicking of an expression perceived in the music.A. by taking over certain aspects of physiological arousal through proprioception (see paragraph above). Cf. William James[8]
- “our feeling of the bodily changes as they occur is the emotion”.[9]
- see above: perception of similarity between music’s expressiveness and a person’s expression of emotions
- similarity of music and emotional speech (Juslin and Laukka[10]): music and speech share some emotion-specific acoustic cues (concerning loudness, tempo, timbre, attack)
- conceptualizing of musical structure through visual imagery: e.g. ascending scale as “upward”; creation of internal landscapes as musical images
- neuroimaging and electrophysiological findings:
- e.g. mirror neurons in the premotor cortex of monkeys are activated both during their own action and another monkey’s action
- pre-motor representation of vocal sound production may be activated by only-listening to music (Koelsch et al.[11])
[edit] Musical expectancy
- The course of a piece of music sometimes violates, delays or confirms a skilled listener’s expectation about how the piece will continue. (Dependence on learning and experience of listener.)
- syntactical relationship between different parts of a piece (e.g. harmonic progression, repetition of parts, melody etc.)
- might influence general arousal and apprehension/anxiety, disappointment.
[edit] Learning and memory
Main article: Music-related memory
These mechanisms are most individual among the components mentioned here, and as they lack a direct connection they are not be considered primary processes that link music and emotion.[edit] Episodic memory
Episodic memory or the ‘Darling, they are playing our tune phenomenon’ (Davies), is certainly of eminent importance to people’s everyday emotional reactions to music. However, it is not a primary emotional reaction to music as to some of its specific features, but a secondary one. An emotional response elicited by a piece of music only through the music’s ability to link to a certain memory is independent of what the music expresses itself. The same string quartet might conjure up happy emotions in the wedding guest and horrible emotions in a survivor from a concentration camp who heard it there. - for episodic memory, music is only a retrieval cue - physiological reaction pattern to original event is memorized alongside with the experienced content? - tendency to youth and early adulthood: music as an important part for the consolidation of a listener’s self-identity in adolescence?[edit] Evaluative conditioning
Definition: music as a conditioned stimulus repeatedly paired with another emotional stimulus; less specific than episodic memory; e.g. the Bavarian beer-fest tune “Ein Prosit der Gemuetlichkeit”.[edit] The nature of musical emotions (some aspects)
The last problem to be considered here is the nature of the emotions elicited by music. Take the kind of sadness one may feel hearing the Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto. The listener in this case feels a different kind of sadness than for loss of a loved person. He neither feels regret for the music as for an unfortunate event, nor compassion for a sentient being experiencing tragedy. Juslin and Västfjäll (2008)state that the listener’s emotional reaction lacks the cognitive appraisal of a “real” emotion, i.e. the subjective evaluation of an event, in this case the music, in relation to goals and needs of the individual. This led some theorists to the conclusion that music does not elicit emotions at all or that music can only elicit moods, i.e. affective states with lower intensity than emotions and without a clear object (cf. Juslin and Västfjäll 2008). Stephen Davies rejects this view. Although the emotional response does not take the music as its intentional object, music is the “perceptional object and the cause for this response”. The listener’s response of sadness is “not about the music, but to the music” (Davies 2006). The emotion enfolds over the course of the music and as a consequence of it. Juslin and Västfjäll (2008)compiled evidence that most of the psychological processes that lead to a real-life emotion can also be found in the emotional responses to music. These include subjective feeling, physiological arousal, brain activation, action tendency, and emotion regulation. Thus, they argue, music-induced emotions are of the same quality as “normal” emotions are, and do not just represent moods.Still, emotions elicited by music have some characteristics that make them different from real-life emotions. Coming back to the example of the piano concerto, the sadness felt at hearing it does not only lack the regret of the sadness at the death of a loved person, but it is also certainly less intense. There seem to be emotional intensities of real-life events that the experience of an artwork cannot reach. In addition, most emotions, particularly the negative ones, felt when listening to music seem to have a positive tinge. Why do we seek the experience of a negative emotion as in a sad piece of music? One reason is that we appreciate, in an artistic, aesthetic way, the music as an artwork that manages to create the expressiveness. Another reason is given by Kendall Walton (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/): Sadness is not negative in itself. Rather the life situation that causes it, e.g. the death of a loved person, is negative. “Thus, though we would not seek out the death of a loved one, given the death we ‘welcome’ the sorrow.” Music gives the listener the possibility of self-experience through real emotions, without the consequences of real-life circumstances, just as any art and play does.
[edit] References
- ^ Cf. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/
- ^ Davies, S. (2006). "Artistic Expression and the Hard Case of Pure Music", in: Kieran, M. (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: 179-91.
- ^ Davies 2006, p. 181.
- ^ Davies 2006, p. 182.
- ^ Scherer, K.R. (2004) while others believe it is a direct response to hormonal release from the hypothalamus which can be empirically measured. "Which Emotions Can be Induced by Music? What Are the Underlying Mechanisms? And How Can We Measure Them?". Journal of New Music Research 33 (3): 239-251
- ^ •Juslin, P.; Västfjäll, D. (2008). "Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms". Behavioural and Brain Sciences: in press.
- ^ Scherer 2004, p. 241.
- ^ James, W. (1884). "What is an emotion". Mind 9 (34): 188-205.
- ^ P. 189–190.
- ^ Juslin, P.N.; Laukka, P. (2003). "Communication of emotions in vocal expression and music performance: different channels, same code?". Psychol Bull 129 (5): 770-814. Retrieved on 2008-06-26.
- ^ Koelsch, S.; Fritz, T.; Von Cramon, D.Y.; Müller, K.; Friederici, A.D. (2006). "Investigating emotion with music: an fMRI study". Human Brain Mapping 27 (3): 239-250. DOI:10.1002/hbm.20180
Sabtu, 16 Juli 2011
Aesthetics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aesthetics (also spelled æsthetics or esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.[1] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste.[2] More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature."[3][4]
Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the eight great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China and Mayan. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Greece had the most influence on the development of aesthetics in the West. This period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of corresponding skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Furthermore, in many Western and Eastern cultures alike, traits such as body hair are rarely depicted in art that addresses physical beauty.[citation needed] More in contrast with this Greek-Western aesthetic taste is the genre of grotesque.[6]
Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness.
According to Islam, human works of art are inherently flawed compared to the work of God; thus, it is believed by many that to attempt to depict in a realistic form any animal or person is insolence to God. This tendency has had the effect of narrowing the field of artistic possibility to such forms of art as Arabesque, mosaic, Islamic calligraphy, and Islamic architecture, as well as more generally any form of abstraction that can claim the status of non-representational art.
The limited possibilities have been explored by artists as an outlet to artistic expression, and has been cultivated to become a positive style and tradition, emphasizing the decorative function of art, or its religious functions via non-representational forms such as Geometric patterns, floral patterns, and arabesques.
Human or animal depiction is generally forbidden altogether in Islamic cultures because it is said to lead to sculptural pieces which then leads to worship of that sculpture or "idol". Human portrayals can be found in early Islamic cultures with varying degrees of acceptance by religious authorities. Human representation for the purpose of worship that is uniformly considered idolatry as forbidden in Sharia law. There are many depictions of Muhammad, Islam's chief prophet, in historical Islamic art.[8][9]
The calligraphic arts grew out of an effort to devote oneself to the study of the Quran. By patiently transcribing each word of the text, the writer was made to contemplate the meaning of it. As time passed, these calligraphic works began to be prized as works of art, growing increasingly elaborate in the illumination and stylizing of the text. These illuminations were applied to other works besides the Quran, and it became a respected art form in and of itself.
In the Pan Indian philosophic thought the term 'Satyam Shivam Sundaram' is another name for the concept of the Supreme. 'Sat' is the truth value, 'Shiv' is the good value & 'Sundaram' is the beauty value. Man through his 'Srabana' or education, 'Manana' or experience and conceptualization and 'Sadhana' or practice, through different stages of life (Asramas) comes to form and realize the idea of these three values to develop a value system. This Value-system helps us to develop two basic ideas 1) that of 'Daksha' or the adept/expert and 2) of Mahana/Parama or the Absolute and thus to judge anything in this universe in the light of these two measures, known as 'Adarsha'. A person who has mastered great amounts of knowledge of the grammars, rules, & language of an art-form are adepts (Daksha), where as those who have worked through the whole system and journeyed ahead of these to become a law unto themself is called a Mahana. Individuals idea of 'Daksha' and 'Mahana' is relative to one's development of the concept of 'Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram.' For example, Tagore's idea of these two concepts should be way above any common man's and many perceive Tagore as a 'Mahana' Artist in the realm of literature. This concept of Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram, a kind of Value Theory is the cornerstone of Indian Aesthetics.
Of particular concern to Indian drama and literature are the term 'Bhava' or the state of mind and rasa referring generally to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive spectator' or sahṛdaya or one with positive taste and mind. Poets like Kālidāsa were attentive to rasa, which blossomed into a fully developed aesthetic system. Even in contemporary India the term rasa denoting "flavor" or "essence" is used colloquially to describe the aesthetic experiences in films; "māsala mix" describes popular Hindi cinema films which serve a so called balanced emotional meal for the masses, savored as rasa by these spectators.
Rasa theory blossoms beginning with the Sanskrit text Nātyashāstra (nātya meaning "drama" and shāstra meaning "science of"), a work attributed to Bharata Muni where the Gods declare that drama is the 'Fifth Veda' because it is suitable for the degenerate age as the best form of religious instruction. While the date of composition varies wildly among scholars, ranging from the era of Plato and Aristotle to the seventh century CE. The Nātyashāstra presents the aesthetic concepts of rasas and their associated bhāvas in Chapters Six and Seven respectively, which appear to be independent of the work as a whole. Eight rasas and associated bhāvas are named and their enjoyment is likened to savoring a meal: rasa is the enjoyment of flavors that arise from the proper preparation of ingredients and the quality of ingredients. What rasa actually is, in a theoretical sense, is not discussed and given the Nātyashāstra's pithy wording it is unlikely the exact understanding of the original author(s) will be known.
The theory of the rasas develops significantly with the Kashmiri aesthetician Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics, the Dhvanyāloka which introduces the ninth rasa, shānta-rasa as a specifically religious feeling of peace (śānta) which arises from its bhāva, weariness of the pleasures of the world. The primary purpose of this text is to refine the literary concept dhvani or poetic suggestion, by arguing for the existence of rasa-dhvani, primarily in forms of Sanskrit including a word, sentence or whole work "suggests" a real-world emotional state or bhāva, but thanks to aesthetic distance, the sensitive spectator relishes the rasa, the aesthetic flavor of tragedy, heroism or romance.
The 9th - 10th century master of the religious system known as "the nondual Shaivism of Kashmir" (or "Kashmir Shaivism") and aesthetician, Abhinavagupta brought rasa theory to its pinnacle in his separate commentaries on the Dhvanyāloka, the Dhvanyāloka-locana (translated by Ingalls, Masson and Patwardhan, 1992) and the Abhinavabharati, his commentary on the Nātyashāstra, portions of which are translated by Gnoli and Masson and Patwardhan. Abhinavagupta offers for the first time a technical definition of rasa which is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman colored by the emotional tone of a drama. Shānta-rasa functions as an equal member of the set of rasas but is simultaneously distinct being the most clear form of aesthetic bliss. Abhinavagupta likens it to the string of a jeweled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for most people, it is the string that gives form to the necklace, allowing the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. Relishing the rasas and particularly shānta-rasa is hinted as being as-good-as but never-equal-to the bliss of Self-realization experienced by yogis.
By the 4th century AD, artists were debating in writing over the proper goals of art as well. Gu Kaizhi has 3 surviving books on this theory of painting, for example, and it's not uncommon to find later artist/scholars who both create art and write about the creating of art. Religious and philosophical influence on art was common (and diverse) but never universal; it is easy to find art that largely ignores philosophy and religion in almost every Chinese time period.
The Great Mosque's signature trio of minarets overlooks the central market of Djenné. Unique Malian aestheticAfrican art existed in many forms and styles, and with fairly little influence from outside Africa. Most of it followed traditional forms and the aesthetic norms were handed down orally as well as written. Sculpture and performance art are prominent, and abstract and partially abstracted forms are valued, and were valued long before influence from the Western tradition began in earnest. The Nok culture is testimony to this. The mosque of Timbuktu shows that specific areas of Africa developed unique aesthetics.
Medieval aesthetics in the realm of philosophy built upon Classical thought, continuing the practice of Plotinus by employing theological terminology in its explications. St. Bonaventure’s “Retracing the Arts to Theology”, a primary example of this method, discusses the skills of the artisan as gifts given by God for the purpose of disclosing God to mankind, which purpose is achieved through four lights: the light of skill in mechanical arts which discloses the world of artifacts; which light is guided by the light of sense perception which discloses the world of natural forms; which light, consequently, is guided by the light of philosophy which discloses the world of intellectual truth; finally, this light is guided by the light of divine wisdom which discloses the world of saving truth.
Saint Thomas Aquinas's aesthetic is probably the most famous and influential theory among medieval authors, having been the subject of much scrutiny in the wake of the neo-Scholastic revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and even having received the approbation of the celebrated Modernist writer, James Joyce. Thomas, like many other medievals, never gives a systematic account of beauty itself, but several scholars have conventionally arranged his thought—though not always with uniform conclusions—using relevant observations spanning the entire corpus of his work. While Aquinas's theory follows generally the model of Aristotle, he develops a singular aesthetics which incorporates elements unique to his thought. Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas identifies the three main characteristics of beauty in Aquinas's philosophy: integritas sive perfectio, consonantia sive debita proportio, and claritas sive splendor formae. While Aristotle likewise identifies the first two characteristics, St. Thomas conceives of the third as an appropriation from principles developed by neo-Platonic and Augustinian thinkers.
With the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, art likewise changed its focus, as much in its content as in its mode of expression.
For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten aesthetics is the science of the sense experiences, a younger sister of logic, and beauty is thus the most perfect kind of knowledge that sense experience can have. For Immanuel Kant the aesthetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but similar human truth, since all people should agree that “this rose is beautiful” if it in fact is. However, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of features. For Friedrich Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.
For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the philosophy of art is the "organon" of philosophy concerning the relation between man and nature. So aesthetics began now to be the name for the philosophy of art. Friedrich von Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel have also given lectures on aesthetics as philosophy of art after 1800.
For Hegel all culture is a matter of "absolute spirit" coming to be manifest to itself, stage by stage, changing to a perfection that only philosophy can approach. Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immediately to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective revelation of beauty.
For Arthur Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here we contemplate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus any intrusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty. It is thus for Schopenhauer one way to fight the suffering.
The British were largely divided into intuitionist and analytic camps. The intuitionists believed that aesthetic experience was disclosed by a single mental faculty of some kind. For Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury this was identical to the moral sense, beauty just is the sensory version of moral goodness. For Ludwig Wittgenstein aesthetics consisted in the description of a whole culture which is a linguistic impossibility. That which constitutes aesthetics lies out side the realm of the language game.
On 7 January 1904 James Joyce attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected from the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero. It was a fictional rendering of Joyce's youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death.
For Oscar Wilde the contemplation of beauty for beauty's sake was not only the foundation for much of his literary career but was quoted as saying "Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.".[10]
Wilde famously toured the United States in 1882. He travelled across the United States spreading the idea of Aesthetics in a speech called "The English Renaissance." In his speech he proposed that Beauty and Aesthetics was "not languid but energetic. By beautifying the outward aspects of life, one would beautify the inner ones." The English Renaissance was, he said, "like the Italian Renaissance before it, a sort of rebirth of the spirit of man".[11]
William Hogarth, self-portrait, 1745For Francis Hutcheson beauty is disclosed by an inner mental sense, but is a subjective fact rather than an objective one. Analytic theorists like Henry Home, Lord Kames, William Hogarth, and Edmund Burke hoped to reduce beauty to some list of attributes. Hogarth, for example, thinks that beauty consists of (1) fitness of the parts to some design; (2) variety in as many ways as possible; (3) uniformity, regularity or symmetry, which is only beautiful when it helps to preserve the character of fitness; (4) simplicity or distinctness, which gives pleasure not in itself, but through its enabling the eye to enjoy variety with ease; (5) intricacy, which provides employment for our active energies, leading the eye on "a wanton kind of chase"; and (6) quantity or magnitude, which draws our attention and produces admiration and awe. Later analytic aestheticians strove to link beauty to some scientific theory of psychology (such as James Mill) or biology (such as Herbert Spencer).
Various attempts have been made to define Post-modern aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo.
Croce suggested that “expression” is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society.[page needed] Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster (art critic) attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty - 'kalos').[14] André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art.[15] Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.[16]
Daniel Berlyne created the field of experimental aesthetics in the 1970s, for which he is still the most cited individual decades after his death.[17]
Pneumaist aestheticism is a theory of art and a highly experimental approach to art negating historical preconceptions of the aesthetic.
Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "...will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."[18][19]
Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.[20] Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty,[21] Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing [22]
Initial image of a Mandelbrot set zoom sequence with continuously coloured environmentIn the 1970s, Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake were among the first to analyze links between aesthetics, information processing, and information theory.[23][24]
In the 1990s, Jürgen 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.[25][26] This is closely related to the principles of algorithmic information theory and minimum description length. One of his examples: mathematicians enjoy simple proofs with a short description in their formal language. Another very concrete example describes an aesthetically pleasing human face whose proportions can be described by very few bits of information,[27][28] drawing inspiration from less detailed 15th century proportion studies by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between what's beautiful and what's interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. Here the premise is that any observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of the observations by discovering regularities such as repetitions and symmetries and fractal self-similarity. Whenever the observer's learning process (which may be a predictive neural network - see also Neuroesthetics) leads to improved data compression such that the observation sequence can be described by fewer bits than before, the temporary interestingness of the data corresponds to the number of saved bits. This compression progress is proportional to the observer's internal reward , also called curiosity reward. A reinforcement learning algorithm is used to maximize future expected reward by learning to execute action sequences that cause additional interesting input data with yet unknown but learnable predictability or regularity. The principles can be implemented on artificial agents which then exhibit a form of artificial curiosity.[29][30][31][32]
Notable in this area is Michael Leyton, professor of psychology at Rutgers University. Leyton is the president of the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics and the International Society for Group Theory in Cognitive Science and has developed a generative theory of shape.
There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess and music.[44]
Aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also our sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." (Essays Moral Political and Literary. Indianapolis, Literary Classics 5, 1987.) Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once.
Viewer interpretations of beauty possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of education and awareness of elite cultural values[clarification needed][citation needed]; therefore taste can be learned[citation needed]. Taste varies according to class, cultural background, and education[citation needed]. According to Kant, beauty is objective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone.[citation needed] The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations.[citation needed]
Rainbows often have aesthetic appeal.Judgments of aesthetic value seem often to involve many other kinds of issues as well. Responses such as disgust show that sensory detection is linked in instinctual ways to facial expressions, and even behaviors like the gag reflex. Yet disgust can often be a learned or cultural issue too; as Darwin pointed out, seeing a stripe of soup in a man's beard is disgusting even though neither soup nor beards are themselves disgusting. Aesthetic judgments may be linked to emotions or, like emotions, partially embodied in our physical reactions. Seeing a sublime view of a landscape may give us a reaction of awe, which might manifest physically as an increased heart rate or widened eyes. These unconscious reactions may even be partly constitutive of what makes our judgment a judgment that the landscape is sublime.
Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful. The Abuse of Beauty, Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value.[45] In a current context, one might judge a Lamborghini to 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.[46]
"Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies". in Studies in animal and human behavior, vol. 2. pp. 115–195. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971 (originally pub. 1950.) Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that is often what we are judging. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.
At the same time, there is seemingly quite a lack of words to express oneself accurately when making an aesthetic judgment. An aesthetic judgment cannot be an empirical judgement. Therefore, due to impossibility for precision, there is confusion about what interpretations can be culturally negotiated. Due to imprecision in the standard English language, two completely different feelings experienced by two different people can be represented by an identical verbal expression. Wittgenstein stated this in his lectures on aesthetics and language games.
A collective identification of beauty, with willing participants in a given social spectrum, may be a socially negotiated phenomenon, discussed in a culture or context. Is there some underlying unity to aesthetic judgment and is there some way to articulate the similarities of a beautiful house, beautiful proof, and beautiful sunset?[48] Defining it requires a description of the entire phenomenon, as Wittgenstein argued in his lectures on aesthetics. Likewise there has been long debate on how perception of beauty in the natural world, especially perception of the human form as beautiful, is supposed to relate to perceiving beauty in art or artefacts. This goes back at least to Kant, with some echoes even in St. Bonaventure.[citation needed]
For some, aesthetics is considered a synonym for the philosophy of art since Hegel, while others insist that there is a significant distinction between these closely related fields. In practice aesthetic judgement refers to the sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object (not necessarily an art object), while artistic judgement refers to the recognition, appreciation or criticism of art or an art work.
The philosophical aesthetics has not only to speak about art and to produce judgments about the art works, but has also to give a definition of what art is. Art is an autonomous entity for the philosophy, because art deals with the senses (i. e. the etymology of aesthetics) and art is as such free of any moral or political purpose. Hence, there are two different conceptions of art in the aesthetics : art as knowledge or art as action, but aesthetics is neither epistemology nor ethics.[51]
Harmony of colorsHow best to define the term “art” is a subject of constant contention; many books and journal articles have been published arguing over even the basics of what we mean by the term “art”.[52] Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.”[53][54] Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and programmers all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that vary considerably. Furthermore, it is clear that even the basic meaning of the term "art" has changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve during the 20th century as well.
The main recent sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or “fine art.” Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.[55] Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.
Even 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 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."[53] Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce’s theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan’s theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".[56] Another view, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. A further approach, elaborated by André Malraux in works such as The Voices of Silence, is that art is fundamentally a response to a metaphysical question ('Art', he writes, 'is an 'anti-destiny'). Malraux argues that, while art has sometimes been oriented towards beauty and the sublime (principally in post-Renaissance European art) these qualities, as the wider history of art demonstrates, are by no means essential to it.[57]
Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that “art” is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a store-bought urinal to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define art.
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. If a poet writes down several lines, intending them as a poem, the very procedure by which it is written makes it a poem. Whereas if a journalist writes exactly the same set of words, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what decides whether or not something is art is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '
Nature provides aesthetic ideals.Art can be difficult at the metaphysical and ontological levels as well as at the value theory level. When we see a performance of Hamlet, how many works of art are we experiencing, and which should we judge? Perhaps there is only one relevant work of art, the whole performance, which many different people have contributed to, and which will exist briefly and then disappear. Perhaps the manuscript by Shakespeare is a distinct work of art from the play by the troupe, which is also distinct from the performance of the play by this troupe on this night, and all three can be judged, but are to be judged by different standards.
Perhaps every person involved should be judged separately on his or her own merits, and each costume or line is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying them all). Similar problems arise for music, film, dance, and even painting. Is one to judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in its context of presentation by the museum workers?
These problems have been made even more difficult by the rise of conceptual art since the 1960s. Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes are nearly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes at the time. It would be a mistake to praise Warhol for the design of his boxes (which were designed by Steve Harvey), yet the conceptual move of exhibiting these boxes as art in a museum together with other kinds of paintings is Warhol's. Are we judging Warhol’s concept? His execution of the concept in the medium? The curator’s insight in letting Warhol display the boxes? The overall result? Our experience or interpretation of the result? Ontologically, how are we to think of the work of art? Is it a physical object? Several objects? A class of objects? A mental object? A fictional object? An abstract object? An event? Or simply an Act?
The value of art, then, is one with the value of empathy.
Other possible views are these: Art can act as a means to some special kind of knowledge. Art may give insight into the human condition. Art relates to science and religion. Art serves as a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation. Art makes us more moral. It uplifts us spiritually. Art is politics by other means. Art has the value of allowing catharsis. In any case, the value of art may determine the suitability of an art form. Do they differ significantly in their values, or (if not) in their ability to achieve the unitary value of art?
But to approach the question of the value of art systematically, one ought to ask: for whom? For the artist? For the audience? For society at large, and/or for individuals beyond the audience? Is the "value" of art different in each of these different contexts?
Working on the intended value of art tends to help define the relations between art and other acts. Art clearly does have spiritual goals in many contexts, but what exactly is the difference between religious art and religion per se? The truth is complex; art is both useless in a functional sense, and also the most important human activity.
An argument for the value of art, used in the fictional work 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy', proceeds that, should some external force presenting imminent destruction of Earth, ask the inhabitants, of what use is humanity, what should humanity's response be? The argument continues that the only justification humanity could give for its continued existence would be the past creation and continued creation of things like a Shakespeare play, a Rembrandt painting or a Bach concerto. The suggestion is that these are the things of value which define humanity.[60]
Increasingly, academics in both the sciences and the humanities look to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to understand the connection between psychology and aesthetics. Aside from Dutton, others exploring this realm include David Bordwell, Brian Boyd, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Noel Carroll, Ellen Dissanayake, Nancy Easterlin, Bracha Ettinger, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Torben Grodal, Paul Hernadi,, Patrick Hogan, Carl Plantinga, Rolf Reber, Elaine Scarry, Murray Smith, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.
"Aesthetician" redirects here. For a cosmetologist who specializes in the study of skin care, see Esthetician.
Not to be confused with ascetic.
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Etymology
It was derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos, meaning "esthetic, sensitive, sentient"), which in turn was derived from αἰσθάνομαι (aisthanomai, meaning "I perceive, feel, sense").[5] The term "aesthetics" was appropriated and coined with new meaning in the German form Æsthetik (modern spelling Ästhetik) by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735.History of aesthetics
[edit] Ancient aesthetics
There are examples of pre-historic art, but they are rare, and the context of their production and use is not very clear, so the aesthetic doctrines that guided their production and interpretation are mostly unknown.Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the eight great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China and Mayan. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Greece had the most influence on the development of aesthetics in the West. This period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of corresponding skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Furthermore, in many Western and Eastern cultures alike, traits such as body hair are rarely depicted in art that addresses physical beauty.[citation needed] More in contrast with this Greek-Western aesthetic taste is the genre of grotesque.[6]
Greek philosophers initially felt that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves. Plato felt that beautiful objects incorporated proportion, harmony, and unity among their parts. Similarly, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle found that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness.
Islamic aesthetics
Islamic art is not, properly speaking, an art pertaining to religion only. The term "Islamic" refers not only to the religion, but to any form of art created in an Islamic culture or in an Islamic context. It would also be a mistake to assume that all Muslims are in agreement on the use of art in religious observance, the proper place of art in society, or the relation between secular art and the demands placed on the secular world to conform to religious precepts. Islamic art frequently adopts secular elements and elements that are frowned upon, if not forbidden, by some Islamic theologians.[7]According to Islam, human works of art are inherently flawed compared to the work of God; thus, it is believed by many that to attempt to depict in a realistic form any animal or person is insolence to God. This tendency has had the effect of narrowing the field of artistic possibility to such forms of art as Arabesque, mosaic, Islamic calligraphy, and Islamic architecture, as well as more generally any form of abstraction that can claim the status of non-representational art.
The limited possibilities have been explored by artists as an outlet to artistic expression, and has been cultivated to become a positive style and tradition, emphasizing the decorative function of art, or its religious functions via non-representational forms such as Geometric patterns, floral patterns, and arabesques.
Human or animal depiction is generally forbidden altogether in Islamic cultures because it is said to lead to sculptural pieces which then leads to worship of that sculpture or "idol". Human portrayals can be found in early Islamic cultures with varying degrees of acceptance by religious authorities. Human representation for the purpose of worship that is uniformly considered idolatry as forbidden in Sharia law. There are many depictions of Muhammad, Islam's chief prophet, in historical Islamic art.[8][9]
The calligraphic arts grew out of an effort to devote oneself to the study of the Quran. By patiently transcribing each word of the text, the writer was made to contemplate the meaning of it. As time passed, these calligraphic works began to be prized as works of art, growing increasingly elaborate in the illumination and stylizing of the text. These illuminations were applied to other works besides the Quran, and it became a respected art form in and of itself.
Indian aesthetics
Indian art evolved with an emphasis on inducing special spiritual or philosophical states in the audience, or with representing them symbolically. According to Kapila Vatsyayan, "Classical Indian architecture, sculpture, painting, literature (kāvya), music, and dancing evolved their own rules conditioned by their respective media, but they shared with one another not only the underlying spiritual beliefs of the Indian religio-philosophic mind, but also the procedures by which the relationships of the symbol and the spiritual states were worked out in detail."In the Pan Indian philosophic thought the term 'Satyam Shivam Sundaram' is another name for the concept of the Supreme. 'Sat' is the truth value, 'Shiv' is the good value & 'Sundaram' is the beauty value. Man through his 'Srabana' or education, 'Manana' or experience and conceptualization and 'Sadhana' or practice, through different stages of life (Asramas) comes to form and realize the idea of these three values to develop a value system. This Value-system helps us to develop two basic ideas 1) that of 'Daksha' or the adept/expert and 2) of Mahana/Parama or the Absolute and thus to judge anything in this universe in the light of these two measures, known as 'Adarsha'. A person who has mastered great amounts of knowledge of the grammars, rules, & language of an art-form are adepts (Daksha), where as those who have worked through the whole system and journeyed ahead of these to become a law unto themself is called a Mahana. Individuals idea of 'Daksha' and 'Mahana' is relative to one's development of the concept of 'Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram.' For example, Tagore's idea of these two concepts should be way above any common man's and many perceive Tagore as a 'Mahana' Artist in the realm of literature. This concept of Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram, a kind of Value Theory is the cornerstone of Indian Aesthetics.
Of particular concern to Indian drama and literature are the term 'Bhava' or the state of mind and rasa referring generally to the emotional flavors/essence crafted into the work by the writer and relished by a 'sensitive spectator' or sahṛdaya or one with positive taste and mind. Poets like Kālidāsa were attentive to rasa, which blossomed into a fully developed aesthetic system. Even in contemporary India the term rasa denoting "flavor" or "essence" is used colloquially to describe the aesthetic experiences in films; "māsala mix" describes popular Hindi cinema films which serve a so called balanced emotional meal for the masses, savored as rasa by these spectators.
Rasa theory blossoms beginning with the Sanskrit text Nātyashāstra (nātya meaning "drama" and shāstra meaning "science of"), a work attributed to Bharata Muni where the Gods declare that drama is the 'Fifth Veda' because it is suitable for the degenerate age as the best form of religious instruction. While the date of composition varies wildly among scholars, ranging from the era of Plato and Aristotle to the seventh century CE. The Nātyashāstra presents the aesthetic concepts of rasas and their associated bhāvas in Chapters Six and Seven respectively, which appear to be independent of the work as a whole. Eight rasas and associated bhāvas are named and their enjoyment is likened to savoring a meal: rasa is the enjoyment of flavors that arise from the proper preparation of ingredients and the quality of ingredients. What rasa actually is, in a theoretical sense, is not discussed and given the Nātyashāstra's pithy wording it is unlikely the exact understanding of the original author(s) will be known.
The theory of the rasas develops significantly with the Kashmiri aesthetician Ãndandavardhana's classic on poetics, the Dhvanyāloka which introduces the ninth rasa, shānta-rasa as a specifically religious feeling of peace (śānta) which arises from its bhāva, weariness of the pleasures of the world. The primary purpose of this text is to refine the literary concept dhvani or poetic suggestion, by arguing for the existence of rasa-dhvani, primarily in forms of Sanskrit including a word, sentence or whole work "suggests" a real-world emotional state or bhāva, but thanks to aesthetic distance, the sensitive spectator relishes the rasa, the aesthetic flavor of tragedy, heroism or romance.
The 9th - 10th century master of the religious system known as "the nondual Shaivism of Kashmir" (or "Kashmir Shaivism") and aesthetician, Abhinavagupta brought rasa theory to its pinnacle in his separate commentaries on the Dhvanyāloka, the Dhvanyāloka-locana (translated by Ingalls, Masson and Patwardhan, 1992) and the Abhinavabharati, his commentary on the Nātyashāstra, portions of which are translated by Gnoli and Masson and Patwardhan. Abhinavagupta offers for the first time a technical definition of rasa which is the universal bliss of the Self or Atman colored by the emotional tone of a drama. Shānta-rasa functions as an equal member of the set of rasas but is simultaneously distinct being the most clear form of aesthetic bliss. Abhinavagupta likens it to the string of a jeweled necklace; while it may not be the most appealing for most people, it is the string that gives form to the necklace, allowing the jewels of the other eight rasas to be relished. Relishing the rasas and particularly shānta-rasa is hinted as being as-good-as but never-equal-to the bliss of Self-realization experienced by yogis.
[edit] Chinese aesthetics
Chinese art has a long history of varied styles and emphases. In ancient times philosophers were already arguing about aesthetics. Confucius emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry) in broadening human nature and aiding "li" (etiquette, the rites) in bringing us back to what is essential about humanity. His opponent Mozi, however, argued that music and fine arts were classist and wasteful, benefiting the rich but not the common people.By the 4th century AD, artists were debating in writing over the proper goals of art as well. Gu Kaizhi has 3 surviving books on this theory of painting, for example, and it's not uncommon to find later artist/scholars who both create art and write about the creating of art. Religious and philosophical influence on art was common (and diverse) but never universal; it is easy to find art that largely ignores philosophy and religion in almost every Chinese time period.
African aesthetics
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[edit] Western medieval aesthetics
Surviving medieval art is primarily religious in focus and funded largely by the State, Roman Catholic or Orthodox church, powerful ecclesiastical individuals, or wealthy secular patrons. These art pieces often served a liturgical function, whether as chalices or even as church buildings themselves. Objects of fine art from this period were frequently made from rare and valuable materials, such as gold and lapis, the cost of which commonly exceeded the wages of the artist.Medieval aesthetics in the realm of philosophy built upon Classical thought, continuing the practice of Plotinus by employing theological terminology in its explications. St. Bonaventure’s “Retracing the Arts to Theology”, a primary example of this method, discusses the skills of the artisan as gifts given by God for the purpose of disclosing God to mankind, which purpose is achieved through four lights: the light of skill in mechanical arts which discloses the world of artifacts; which light is guided by the light of sense perception which discloses the world of natural forms; which light, consequently, is guided by the light of philosophy which discloses the world of intellectual truth; finally, this light is guided by the light of divine wisdom which discloses the world of saving truth.
Saint Thomas Aquinas's aesthetic is probably the most famous and influential theory among medieval authors, having been the subject of much scrutiny in the wake of the neo-Scholastic revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and even having received the approbation of the celebrated Modernist writer, James Joyce. Thomas, like many other medievals, never gives a systematic account of beauty itself, but several scholars have conventionally arranged his thought—though not always with uniform conclusions—using relevant observations spanning the entire corpus of his work. While Aquinas's theory follows generally the model of Aristotle, he develops a singular aesthetics which incorporates elements unique to his thought. Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas identifies the three main characteristics of beauty in Aquinas's philosophy: integritas sive perfectio, consonantia sive debita proportio, and claritas sive splendor formae. While Aristotle likewise identifies the first two characteristics, St. Thomas conceives of the third as an appropriation from principles developed by neo-Platonic and Augustinian thinkers.
Modern aesthetics
From the late 17th to the early 20th century Western aesthetics underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism. German and British thinkers emphasised beauty as the key component of art and of the aesthetic experience, and saw art as necessarily aiming at absolute beauty.For Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten aesthetics is the science of the sense experiences, a younger sister of logic, and beauty is thus the most perfect kind of knowledge that sense experience can have. For Immanuel Kant the aesthetic experience of beauty is a judgment of a subjective but similar human truth, since all people should agree that “this rose is beautiful” if it in fact is. However, beauty cannot be reduced to any more basic set of features. For Friedrich Schiller aesthetic appreciation of beauty is the most perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of human nature.
For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, the philosophy of art is the "organon" of philosophy concerning the relation between man and nature. So aesthetics began now to be the name for the philosophy of art. Friedrich von Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel have also given lectures on aesthetics as philosophy of art after 1800.
For Hegel all culture is a matter of "absolute spirit" coming to be manifest to itself, stage by stage, changing to a perfection that only philosophy can approach. Art is the first stage in which the absolute spirit is manifest immediately to sense-perception, and is thus an objective rather than subjective revelation of beauty.
For Arthur Schopenhauer aesthetic contemplation of beauty is the most free that the pure intellect can be from the dictates of will; here we contemplate perfection of form without any kind of worldly agenda, and thus any intrusion of utility or politics would ruin the point of the beauty. It is thus for Schopenhauer one way to fight the suffering.
The British were largely divided into intuitionist and analytic camps. The intuitionists believed that aesthetic experience was disclosed by a single mental faculty of some kind. For Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury this was identical to the moral sense, beauty just is the sensory version of moral goodness. For Ludwig Wittgenstein aesthetics consisted in the description of a whole culture which is a linguistic impossibility. That which constitutes aesthetics lies out side the realm of the language game.
On 7 January 1904 James Joyce attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected from the free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday, to revise the story into a novel he called Stephen Hero. It was a fictional rendering of Joyce's youth, but he eventually grew frustrated with its direction and abandoned this work. It was never published in this form, but years later, in Trieste, Joyce completely rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The unfinished Stephen Hero was published after his death.
For Oscar Wilde the contemplation of beauty for beauty's sake was not only the foundation for much of his literary career but was quoted as saying "Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.".[10]
Wilde famously toured the United States in 1882. He travelled across the United States spreading the idea of Aesthetics in a speech called "The English Renaissance." In his speech he proposed that Beauty and Aesthetics was "not languid but energetic. By beautifying the outward aspects of life, one would beautify the inner ones." The English Renaissance was, he said, "like the Italian Renaissance before it, a sort of rebirth of the spirit of man".[11]
Post-modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis
Early twentieth century artists, poets and composers challenged existing notions of beauty, broadening the scope of art and aesthetics. In 1941, Eli Siegel, American philosopher and poet, founded Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites."[12][13]Various attempts have been made to define Post-modern aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo.
Croce suggested that “expression” is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society.[page needed] Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster (art critic) attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty - 'kalos').[14] André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art.[15] Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.[16]
Daniel Berlyne created the field of experimental aesthetics in the 1970s, for which he is still the most cited individual decades after his death.[17]
Pneumaist aestheticism is a theory of art and a highly experimental approach to art negating historical preconceptions of the aesthetic.
Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "...will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."[18][19]
Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.[20] Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty,[21] Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing [22]
Aesthetics and information
In the 1990s, Jürgen 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.[25][26] This is closely related to the principles of algorithmic information theory and minimum description length. One of his examples: mathematicians enjoy simple proofs with a short description in their formal language. Another very concrete example describes an aesthetically pleasing human face whose proportions can be described by very few bits of information,[27][28] drawing inspiration from less detailed 15th century proportion studies by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between what's beautiful and what's interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. Here the premise is that any observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of the observations by discovering regularities such as repetitions and symmetries and fractal self-similarity. Whenever the observer's learning process (which may be a predictive neural network - see also Neuroesthetics) leads to improved data compression such that the observation sequence can be described by fewer bits than before, the temporary interestingness of the data corresponds to the number of saved bits. This compression progress is proportional to the observer's internal reward , also called curiosity reward. A reinforcement learning algorithm is used to maximize future expected reward by learning to execute action sequences that cause additional interesting input data with yet unknown but learnable predictability or regularity. The principles can be implemented on artificial agents which then exhibit a form of artificial curiosity.[29][30][31][32]
Applied aesthetics
Main article: Applied aesthetics
As well as being applied to art aesthetics can also be applied to cultural objects. Aesthetic coupling between art-objects and medical topics was made by speakers working for the US Information Agency[33] This coupling was made to reinforce the learning paradigm when English-language speakers used translators to address audiences in their own country. These audiences were generally not fluent in the English language. It can also be used in topics as diverse as mathematics, gastronomy, fashion and website design.[34]Aesthetic ethics
Aesthetic ethics refers to the idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive. John Dewey [35] has pointed out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behaviour being "fair" - the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable. More recently, James Page [36] has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form a philosophical rationale for peace education.[edit] Truth as beauty, mathematics, analytic philosophy, and physics
Mathematical considerations, such as symmetry and complexity, are used for analysis in theoretical aesthetics. This is different from the aesthetic considerations of applied aesthetics used in the study of mathematical beauty. Aesthetic considerations such as symmetry and simplicity are used in areas of philosophy, such as ethics and theoretical physics and cosmology to define truth, outside of empirical considerations. Beauty and Truth have been argued to be nearly synonymous,[37] as reflected in the statement "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" in the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. The fact that judgments of beauty and judgments of truth both are influenced by processing fluency, which is the ease with which information can be processed, has been presented as an explanation for why beauty is sometimes equated with truth.[38] Indeed, recent research found that people use beauty as an indication for truth in mathematical pattern tasks.[39]Computational inference of aesthetics
Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images[40][41][42]. Typically, these approaches follow a machine learning approach, where larges 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.[43]Notable in this area is Michael Leyton, professor of psychology at Rutgers University. Leyton is the president of the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics and the International Society for Group Theory in Cognitive Science and has developed a generative theory of shape.
There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to chess and music.[44]
Aesthetic judgment
Judgments of aesthetic value rely on our ability to discriminate at a sensory level. Aesthetics examines our affective domain response to an object or phenomenon. Immanuel Kant, writing in 1790, observes of a man "If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: It is agreeable to me," because "Everyone has his own (sense of) taste". The case of "beauty" is different from mere "agreeableness" because, "If he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things."Aesthetic judgments usually go beyond sensory discrimination. For David Hume, delicacy of taste is not merely "the ability to detect all the ingredients in a composition", but also our sensitivity "to pains as well as pleasures, which escape the rest of mankind." (Essays Moral Political and Literary. Indianapolis, Literary Classics 5, 1987.) Thus, the sensory discrimination is linked to capacity for pleasure. For Kant "enjoyment" is the result when pleasure arises from sensation, but judging something to be "beautiful" has a third requirement: sensation must give rise to pleasure by engaging our capacities of reflective contemplation. Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual all at once.
Viewer interpretations of beauty possess two concepts of value: aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is the philosophical notion of beauty. Taste is a result of education and awareness of elite cultural values[clarification needed][citation needed]; therefore taste can be learned[citation needed]. Taste varies according to class, cultural background, and education[citation needed]. According to Kant, beauty is objective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone.[citation needed] The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations.[citation needed]
Factors involved in aesthetic judgment
Likewise, aesthetic judgments may be culturally conditioned to some extent. Victorians in Britain often saw African sculpture as ugly, but just a few decades later, Edwardian audiences saw the same sculptures as being beautiful. The Abuse of Beauty, Evaluations of beauty may well be linked to desirability, perhaps even to sexual desirability. Thus, judgments of aesthetic value can become linked to judgments of economic, political, or moral value.[45] In a current context, one might judge a Lamborghini to 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.[46]
"Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies". in Studies in animal and human behavior, vol. 2. pp. 115–195. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1971 (originally pub. 1950.) Aesthetic judgments can often be very fine-grained and internally contradictory. Likewise aesthetic judgments seem often to be at least partly intellectual and interpretative. It is what a thing means or symbolizes for us that is often what we are judging. Modern aestheticians have asserted that will and desire were almost dormant in aesthetic experience, yet preference and choice have seemed important aesthetics to some 20th century thinkers. The point is already made by Hume, but see Mary Mothersill, "Beauty and the Critic’s Judgment", in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 2004. Thus aesthetic judgments might be seen to be based on the senses, emotions, intellectual opinions, will, desires, culture, preferences, values, subconscious behavior, conscious decision, training, instinct, sociological institutions, or some complex combination of these, depending on exactly which theory one employs.
Are different art forms beautiful, disgusting, or boring in the same way?
A third major topic in the study of aesthetic judgments is how they are unified across art forms. We can call a person, a house, a symphony, a fragrance, and a mathematical proof beautiful. What characteristics do they share which give them that status? What possible feature could a proof and a fragrance both share in virtue of which they both count as beautiful? What makes a painting beautiful is quite different from what makes music beautiful, which suggests that each art form has its own language for the judgement of aesthetics.[47]At the same time, there is seemingly quite a lack of words to express oneself accurately when making an aesthetic judgment. An aesthetic judgment cannot be an empirical judgement. Therefore, due to impossibility for precision, there is confusion about what interpretations can be culturally negotiated. Due to imprecision in the standard English language, two completely different feelings experienced by two different people can be represented by an identical verbal expression. Wittgenstein stated this in his lectures on aesthetics and language games.
A collective identification of beauty, with willing participants in a given social spectrum, may be a socially negotiated phenomenon, discussed in a culture or context. Is there some underlying unity to aesthetic judgment and is there some way to articulate the similarities of a beautiful house, beautiful proof, and beautiful sunset?[48] Defining it requires a description of the entire phenomenon, as Wittgenstein argued in his lectures on aesthetics. Likewise there has been long debate on how perception of beauty in the natural world, especially perception of the human form as beautiful, is supposed to relate to perceiving beauty in art or artefacts. This goes back at least to Kant, with some echoes even in St. Bonaventure.[citation needed]
Aesthetics and the philosophy of art
| “ | Aesthetics is for the artist as Ornithology is for the birds. | ” |
The philosophical aesthetics has not only to speak about art and to produce judgments about the art works, but has also to give a definition of what art is. Art is an autonomous entity for the philosophy, because art deals with the senses (i. e. the etymology of aesthetics) and art is as such free of any moral or political purpose. Hence, there are two different conceptions of art in the aesthetics : art as knowledge or art as action, but aesthetics is neither epistemology nor ethics.[51]
What is "art"?
The main recent sense of the word “art” is roughly as an abbreviation for creative art or “fine art.” Here we mean that skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the “finer” things. Often, if the skill is being used in a functional object, people will consider it a craft instead of art, a suggestion which is highly disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, or contrariwise these may be defended as art forms, perhaps called applied art. Some thinkers, for instance, have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with the actual function of the object than any clear definitional difference.[55] Art usually implies no function other than to convey or communicate an idea.
Even 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 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."[53] Perhaps some notion like "expression" (in Croce’s theories) or "counter-environment" (in McLuhan’s theory) can replace the previous role of beauty. Brian Massumi brought back "beauty" into consideration together with "expression".[56] Another view, as important to the philosophy of art as "beauty," is that of the "sublime," elaborated upon in the twentieth century by the postmodern philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. A further approach, elaborated by André Malraux in works such as The Voices of Silence, is that art is fundamentally a response to a metaphysical question ('Art', he writes, 'is an 'anti-destiny'). Malraux argues that, while art has sometimes been oriented towards beauty and the sublime (principally in post-Renaissance European art) these qualities, as the wider history of art demonstrates, are by no means essential to it.[57]
Perhaps (as in Kennick's theory) no definition of art is possible anymore. Perhaps art should be thought of as a cluster of related concepts in a Wittgensteinian fashion (as in Weitz or Beuys). Another approach is to say that “art” is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions. This "institutional definition of art" (see also Institutional Critique) has been championed by George Dickie. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a store-bought urinal to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e., the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define art.
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. If a poet writes down several lines, intending them as a poem, the very procedure by which it is written makes it a poem. Whereas if a journalist writes exactly the same set of words, intending them as shorthand notes to help him write a longer article later, these would not be a poem. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims that what decides whether or not something is art is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. Functionalists like Monroe Beardsley argue that whether or not a piece counts as art depends on what function it plays in a particular context; the same Greek vase may play a non-artistic function in one context (carrying wine), and an artistic function in another context (helping us to appreciate the beauty of the human figure). '
See also: Classificatory disputes about art
What should we judge when we judge art?
Perhaps every person involved should be judged separately on his or her own merits, and each costume or line is its own work of art (with perhaps the director having the job of unifying them all). Similar problems arise for music, film, dance, and even painting. Is one to judge the painting itself, the work of the painter, or perhaps the painting in its context of presentation by the museum workers?
These problems have been made even more difficult by the rise of conceptual art since the 1960s. Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes are nearly indistinguishable from actual Brillo boxes at the time. It would be a mistake to praise Warhol for the design of his boxes (which were designed by Steve Harvey), yet the conceptual move of exhibiting these boxes as art in a museum together with other kinds of paintings is Warhol's. Are we judging Warhol’s concept? His execution of the concept in the medium? The curator’s insight in letting Warhol display the boxes? The overall result? Our experience or interpretation of the result? Ontologically, how are we to think of the work of art? Is it a physical object? Several objects? A class of objects? A mental object? A fictional object? An abstract object? An event? Or simply an Act?
What should art be like?
Many goals have been argued for art, and aestheticians often argue that some goal or another is superior in some way. Clement Greenberg, for instance, argued in 1960 that each artistic medium should seek that which makes it unique among the possible mediums and then purify itself of anything other than expression of its own uniqueness as a form.[58] The Dadaist Tristan Tzara on the other hand saw the function of art in 1918 as the destruction of a mad social order. “We must sweep and clean. Affirm the cleanliness of the individual after the state of madness, aggressive complete madness of a world abandoned to the hands of bandits.”[59] Formal goals, creative goals, self-expression, political goals, spiritual goals, philosophical goals, and even more perceptual or aesthetic goals have all been popular pictures of what art should be like.The value of art
Tolstoy defined art (and by no coincidence also characterized its value) as the following: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."The value of art, then, is one with the value of empathy.
Other possible views are these: Art can act as a means to some special kind of knowledge. Art may give insight into the human condition. Art relates to science and religion. Art serves as a tool of education, or indoctrination, or enculturation. Art makes us more moral. It uplifts us spiritually. Art is politics by other means. Art has the value of allowing catharsis. In any case, the value of art may determine the suitability of an art form. Do they differ significantly in their values, or (if not) in their ability to achieve the unitary value of art?
But to approach the question of the value of art systematically, one ought to ask: for whom? For the artist? For the audience? For society at large, and/or for individuals beyond the audience? Is the "value" of art different in each of these different contexts?
Working on the intended value of art tends to help define the relations between art and other acts. Art clearly does have spiritual goals in many contexts, but what exactly is the difference between religious art and religion per se? The truth is complex; art is both useless in a functional sense, and also the most important human activity.
An argument for the value of art, used in the fictional work 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy', proceeds that, should some external force presenting imminent destruction of Earth, ask the inhabitants, of what use is humanity, what should humanity's response be? The argument continues that the only justification humanity could give for its continued existence would be the past creation and continued creation of things like a Shakespeare play, a Rembrandt painting or a Bach concerto. The suggestion is that these are the things of value which define humanity.[60]
Aesthetic universals
The philosopher Denis Dutton identified seven universal signatures in human aesthetics:[61]- Expertise or virtuosity. Humans cultivate, recognize, and admire technical artistic skills.
- Nonutilitarian pleasure. People enjoy art for art's sake, and don't demand that it keep them warm or put food on the table.
- Style. Artistic objects and performances satisfy rules of composition that place them in a recognizable style.
- Criticism. People make a point of judging, appreciating, and interpreting works of art.
- Imitation. With a few important exceptions like abstract painting, works of art simulate experiences of the world.
- Special focus. Art is set aside from ordinary life and made a dramatic focus of experience.
Increasingly, academics in both the sciences and the humanities look to evolutionary psychology and cognitive science in an effort to understand the connection between psychology and aesthetics. Aside from Dutton, others exploring this realm include David Bordwell, Brian Boyd, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Noel Carroll, Ellen Dissanayake, Nancy Easterlin, Bracha Ettinger, David Evans, Jonathan Gottschall, Torben Grodal, Paul Hernadi,, Patrick Hogan, Carl Plantinga, Rolf Reber, Elaine Scarry, Murray Smith, Wendy Steiner, Robert Storey, Frederick Turner, and Mark Turner.
Criticism
The philosophy of aesthetics as a practice has been criticized by some sociologists and writers of art and society. Raymond Williams argues that there is no unique and or individual aesthetic object which can be extrapolated from the art world, but that there is a continuum of cultural forms and experience of which ordinary speech and experiences may signal as art. By "art" we may frame several artistic "works" or "creations" as so though this reference remains within the institution or special event which creates it and this leaves some works or other possible "art" outside of the frame work, or other interpretations such as other phenomenon which may not be considered as "art". Pierre Bourdieu disagrees with Kant's idea of the "aesthetic". He argues that Kant's "aesthetic" merely represents an experience that is the product of an elevated class habitus and scholarly leisure as opposed to other possible and equally valid "aesthetic" experiences which lay outside Kant's narrow definition.See also
- Aesthetes
- Aestheticism
- Aesthetic emotions
- Aesthetic Realism
- Aesthetic relativism
- Anti-art
- Art object
- Authenticity in art
- Beauty
- Classificatory disputes about art
- Cool (African philosophy)
- Cultural sensibility
- Gaze
- Golden ratio
- History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century)
- Humanistic Aestheticism
- Industrial Design
- Japanese Iki (aesthetic ideal)
- List of aestheticians
- List of topics in philosophical aesthetics
- Lookism
- Marxist aesthetics
- Mathematics and art
- Music and emotion
- Michel Tapié
- Neuroesthetics
- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
- Perfection ("Aesthetic perfection")
- Physical attraction
- Picturesque
- Postmodern art
- Processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure
- Psychology of art
- Schopenhauer's aesthetics
- Semiotics of Ideal Beauty
- Sexual attraction
- Sexual selection
- Sublime (philosophy)
- Taste (aesthetics)
- Terrain Gallery
- Theological aesthetics
- Ugliness
- Wabi-sabi
References
- ^ Definition 1 of aesthetics from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online.
- ^ Zangwill, Nick. "Aesthetic Judgment", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008.
- ^ Kelly (1998) p. ix
- ^ Review by Tom Riedel (Regis University)
- ^ Definition of aesthetic from the Online Etymology Dictionary
- ^ Grotesque entry in Kelly 1998, pp.338-341
- ^ Davies, Penelope J.E. Denny, Walter B. Hofrichter, Frima Fox. Jacobs, Joseph. Roberts, Ann M. Simon, David L. Janson's History of Art, Prentice Hall; 2007, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Seventh Edition, ISBN 0131934554 pg. 277
- ^ The Arab Contribution to Islamic Art: From the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, Wijdan Ali, American Univ in Cairo Press, December 10, 1999, ISBN 9774244761
- ^ From the Literal to the Spiritual: The Development of the Prophet Muhammad's(s.a.w) Portrayal from 13th century Ilkhanid Miniatures to 17th century Ottoman Art, Wijdan Ali, EJOS (Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies), volume IV, issue 7, p. 1-24, 2001
- ^ "Oscar Wilde" by Richard Ellman p 159, pub Alfred A Knopf, INC. 1988
- ^ Ellman, p164
- ^ Green, Edward, "Donald Francis Tovey, Aesthetic Realism and the Need for a Philosophic Musicology," International Revue of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 2005, p. 227. [1]
- ^ Siegel, Eli, "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?", Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 1955.[2]
- ^ 'Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art' in Art Journal v. 63 no. 2 (Summer 2004) p. 24-35
- ^ Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, André Malraux's Theory of Art (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)
- ^ Massumi, Brian, (ed.), A Shock to Thought. Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London & NY: Routeledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-23804-8
- ^ Daniel Berlyne (1924-1976): Biographical Analysis. http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/furedy/daniel_berlyne.htm
- ^ Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, What is Postmodernism?, in The Postmodern Condition, Minnesota and Manchester, 1984.
- ^ Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, Scriptures: Diffracted Traces, in Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.
- ^ Freud, Sigmund, "The Uncanny" (1919). Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, 17:234-36. London: The Hogarth Press
- ^ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964), "The Visible and the Invisible". Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-810-10457-1
- ^ Lacan, Jacques, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII), NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
- ^ A. Moles: Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique, Paris, Denoël, 1973 (Information Theory and aesthetical perception)
- ^ F Nake (1974). Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung. (Aesthetics as information processing). Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik. Springer, 1974, ISBN 3211812164, ISBN 9783211812167
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Low-complexity art. Leonardo, Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, 30(2):97–103, 1997. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1576418
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Papers on the theory of beauty and low-complexity art since 1994: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Facial beauty and fractal geometry. Cogprint Archive: http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk , 1998
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Simple Algorithmic Principles of Discovery, Subjective Beauty, Selective Attention, Curiosity & Creativity. Proc. 10th Intl. Conf. on Discovery Science (DS 2007) p. 26-38, LNAI 4755, Springer, 2007. Also in Proc. 18th Intl. Conf. on Algorithmic Learning Theory (ALT 2007) p. 32, LNAI 4754, Springer, 2007. Joint invited lecture for DS 2007 and ALT 2007, Sendai, Japan, 2007. arXiv:0709.0674
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Curious model-building control systems. International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Singapore, vol 2, 1458–1463. IEEE press, 1991
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Papers on artificial curiosity since 1990: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html
- ^ J. Schmidhuber. Developmental robotics, optimal artificial curiosity, creativity, music, and the fine arts. Connection Science, 18(2):173–187, 2006
- ^ Schmidhuber's theory of beauty and curiosity in a German TV show: http://www.br-online.de/bayerisches-fernsehen/faszination-wissen/schoenheit--aesthetik-wahrnehmung-ID1212005092828.xml
- ^ Giannini AJ (December 1993). "Tangential symbols: using visual symbolization to teach pharmacological principles of drug addiction to international audiences". Journal of clinical pharmacology 33 (12): 1139–46. PMID 7510314.
- ^ Moshagen, M. & Thielsch, M. T. (2010). Facets of visual aesthetics. In: International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 68 (10), 689-709. PDF
- ^ Dewey, John. (1932)'Ethics', with James Tufts. In: The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953 Edited Jo-Ann Boydston: Carbonsdale: Southern Illinois University Press. p. 275.
- ^ Page, James S. (2008) Peace Education: Exploring Ethical and Philosophical Foundations. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. ISBN 978-1-59311-889-1. [3][4]
- ^ Why Beauty Is Truth: The History of Symmetry, Ian Stewart, 2008
- ^ 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
- ^ Reber, R, Brun, M, Mitterndorfer, K: "The use of heuristics in intuitive mathematical judgment", Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(6):1174-1178
- ^ Datta, R.; Joshi, D.; Li, J.; Wang, J. (2006). "Studying aesthetics in photographic images using a computational approach". Europ. Conf. on Computer Vision. Springer.
- ^ Wong, L.-K.; Low, K.-L. (2009). "Saliency-enhanced image aesthetic classification". Int. Conf. on Image Processing. IEEE.
- ^ Wu, Y.; Bauckhage, C.; Thurau, C. (2010). "The good, the bad, and the ugly: predicting aesthetic image labels". Int. Conf. on Pattern Recognition. IEEE.
- ^ "Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine - Instant Impersonal Assessment of Photos". Penn State University. Retrieved 21 June 2009.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Holm, Ivar (2006). Ideas and Beliefs in Architecture and Industrial design: How attitudes, orientations, and underlying assumptions shape the built environment. Oslo School of Architecture and Design. ISBN 8254701741.
- ^ Korsmeyer, Carolyn ed. Aesthetics: The Big Questions 1998
- ^ Consider Clement Greenberg’s arguments in "On Modernist Painting" (1961), reprinted in Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of Arts.
- ^ Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment.
- ^ Barnett Newman Foundation, Chronology, 1952 Retrieved August 30, 2010
- ^ The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, By Arthur Coleman Danto, p.1, Published by Open Court Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0812695402, 9780812695403
- ^ Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Introduction to Aesthetics (Einführung in die Ästhetik), Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 1995, p. 7.
- ^ Davies, 1991, Carroll, 2000, et al.
- ^ a b Danto, 2003
- ^ Goodman,
- ^ Novitz, 1992
- ^ Brian Massumi, Deleuze, Guattari and the Philosophy of Expression, CRCL, 24:3, 1997.
- ^ Derek Allan. Art and the Human Adventure. André Malraux’s Theory of Art. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009)
- ^ Clement Greenberg, “On Modernist Painting”.
- ^ Tristan Tzara, Sept Manifestes Dada.
- ^ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
- ^ Denis Dutton's Aesthetic Universals summarized by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate
- ^ Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux's Theory of Art. (Amsterdam: Rodopi. 2009)
[edit] Further reading
- Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. Edited by Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree. (Series: Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 59) Springer, Dordrecht / Heidelberg / London / New York 2010. ISBN 978-90-481-2470-1
- Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
- Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, Andre Malraux's Theory of Art, Rodopi, 2009
- 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)
- John Bender and Gene Blocker Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics 1993.
- Christine Buci-Glucksmann (2003), Esthétique de l'éphémère, Galilée. (French)
- Noel Carroll (2000), Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press.
- Mario Costa (1999) (in Italian), L’estetica dei media. Avanguardie e tecnologia, Milan: Castelvecchi, ISBN 8882101657.
- Benedetto Croce (1922), Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic.
- E. S. Dallas (1866), The Gay Science, 2 volumes, on the aesthetics of poetry.
- Danto, Arthur (2003), The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, Open Court.
- Stephen Davies (1991), Definitions of Art.
- Terry Eagleton (1990), The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-16302-6
- Feagin and Maynard (1997), Aesthetics. Oxford Readers.
- Penny Florence and Nicola Foster (eds.) (2000), Differential Aesthetics. London: Ashgate. ISBN 0-7546-1493-X
- Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), "Routledge Companion to Aesthetics". London: Routledge, 2005. ISBN 0415327989
- Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (1995), Einführung in die Ästhetik, Munich, W. Fink.
- David Goldblatt and Lee Brown, ed. (1997), Aesthetics: A Reader in the Philosophy of the Arts.
- Greenberg, Clement (1960), "Modernist Painting", The Collected Essays and Criticism 1957-1969, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, 85-92.
- Evelyn Hatcher (ed.), Art as Culture: An Introduction to the Anthropology of Art. 1999
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1975), Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- 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
- Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds.), Art History and Visual Studies. Yale University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-300-09789-1
- Kant, Immanuel (1790), Critique of Judgement, Translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett Publishing Co., 1987.
- Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 4 voll., pp. XVII-521, pp. 555, pp. 536, pp. 572; 2224 total pages; 100 b/w photos; ISBN 978-0-19-511307-5. Covers philosophical, historical, sociological, and biographical aspects of Art and Aesthetics worldwide.
- Alexander J. Kent, "Aesthetics: A Lost Cause in Cartographic Theory?" The Cartographic Journal, 42(2) 182-8, 2005.
- Søren Kierkegaard (1843), Either/Or, translated by Alastair Hannay, London, Penguin, 1992
- Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. 2004
- Carolyn Korsmeyer (ed.), Aesthetics: The Big Questions. 1998
- Lyotard, Jean-François (1979), The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, 1984.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1969), The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University Press.
- Martinus Nijhoff, A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics, The Hague, 1980.
- Novitz, David (1992), The Boundaries of Art.
- Mario Perniola, The Art and Its Shadow, foreword by Hugh J.Silverman, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London-NewYork, Continuum, 2004.
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, 1974, paperpack, or hardback first edition ISBN 0-688-00230-7
- 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 (1896) , The Sense of Beauty. Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. 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
- Władysław Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (1–2, 1970; 3, 1974), The Hague, Mouton.
- Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?, Penguin Classics, 1995.
- The London Philosophy Study Guide offers many suggestions on what to read, depending on the student's familiarity with the subject: Aesthetics
- John M. Valentine, Beginning Aesthetics: An Introduction To The Philosophy of Art. McGraw-Hill, 2006. ISBN 978-0073537542
- Thomas Wartenberg, The Nature of Art. 2006.
- John Whitehead, Grasping for the Wind. 2001.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief, Oxford, Blackwell, 1966.
- Richard Wollheim, Art and its objects, 2nd edn, 1980, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521 29706 0
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