Aesthetics

Beauty, Taste, and Disinterest

As a field, aesthetics was formally developed in the 18th century. One of the early influential theorists of aesthetics was Immanuel Kant, whose theory of beauty was comprised of four concepts: freedom from concepts, defined as purpose; objectivity, attributed to the universality of certain experiences and thereby rendering them objective; disinterest, an intellectual involvement with an object of study in which an individual removes feelings and personal experience from the encounter, thus creating no meaning beyond the object itself and enjoyed for its own sake; and its obligatoriness, or the ways in which this selfless disinterest in viewing an artwork, rather than a desire to possess it, allows us to rise above passions and interests and thus engage in an act of morality. For Kant, subjectivity is presumed by a unity of experience across individuals.

Philosopher David Hume, along with Kant, advanced the notion of taste, arguing that taste could be developed and refined through education. But Kant further distinguished between pleasures and beauty, the latter of which he assigned to art. Aesthetics was therefore advanced as a value in and of itself. The concept of taste continues today and has been advanced by others, notably Frank Sibley.

Aesthetics and aesthetic experience can be viewed as both pleasurable and unpleasant. Philosopher Edmund Burke added the concept ofsublime to the concept of beauty in the mid-18th century, thus establishing an argument for aesthetics as comprised not just of pure beauty but also of pain, horror, and drama.

The philosophical tradition set forth by Kant's notion of aesthetics, as well as notions of taste and the sublime, is evident in both modern art and modernist philosophy of the 20th century. Modernist philosophy emphasized form, in which the beauty or quality of art is inherent in the art itself and therefore evaluated without any reference to historical, social, cultural, or political influences. Modernist art and philosophy strove for a formal and universal language rather than focusing on, or representing, everyday life experiences or personal identity. External references to the art were not considered when judging the value of a work of art.

Whereas media and materials have nearly always been hierarchically ranked in terms of their artistic value, the concept of fine art became aligned with the notion of aesthetic, in contrast to applied arts, crafts, or entertainment, which became aligned with the utilitarian or domestic. Fine art came to be considered as objects of virtue, beauty, and sublimity, and aesthetics became aligned with the idea of taste that was separate, and elevated, from other pleasurable pursuits. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of [Page 9]“art for art's sake” arose as theories of the aesthetic separated from moral philosophy linking art with virtue. The concept of the artist became aligned with these views as one who is uniquely gifted or genius, a conduit for divine inspiration yet schooled in a particular art form.

...