INTRO TO

AESTHETICS
WHAT IS ART?
AESTHETICS
• The study of beauty and artistic taste.
TASK
• With a partner or two, try to agree on a
definition of art.
• Make sure your criteria are clear, and write
down your definition.
THEORIES OF ART
REPRESENTATIONALISM
• The goal of art is to create a perfect
likeness of reality.
• Aesthetic pleasure comes from the
experience of an illusion of reality.
REPRESENTATIONALISM

ARISTOTLE
Artistic imitations of reality give us pleasure,
“with the more pleasure the more exactly they
are imitated.”
Caravaggio
Narcissus
(1597)
EXPRESSIONISM
• The most important aspect of art is the
feelings expressed by the artist and evoked
in the viewer.
• Aesthetic pleasure comes from the
emotional impact – often through feelings of
tension and release.
EXPRESSIONISM

DAVID HUME (1711-1776)

• Hume links appreciation of art purely to
feeling, and not to thought: “the very feeling
constitutes our praise or admiration” for a
work of art.
FORMALISM
•

• The most important aspect of art is its

visual/auditory elements, and how these
elements come together to create
something beautiful.
• Example: in painting, attention to brushwork,
line, colour, or composition  beautiful
effect.
FORMALISM
• Art is intrinsically art.
CLIVE BELL (1881-1964):
“The ideas of men go buzz and die like gnats -
… only great art remains stable and
unobscured.”
CLIVE BELL:

• “What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our

aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia
and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian
bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and the
masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and
Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant
form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular
way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic
emotions.”
Chauvet
Cave, about
30,000 years
old 
INSTITUTIONALISM
• Something is art if it is considered to be art
by artists, critics, and galleries.
• Art is not inherently art – it becomes art in
the context of our developing views on art.
INSTITUTIONALISM
ARTHUR DANTO (1924-2013)
• “To see something as art requires something the
eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic
theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an
artworld.”
Andy Warhol
Brillo Soap
Pads Box
(1964)