15
votes
Accepted
Are "aesthetic experiences" limited to art and music?
The short answer is no. For instance, in a topic dear to me, there is talk of the aesthetics of mathematics. From WP:
Mathematical beauty is the aesthetic pleasure typically derived from the ...
- 22.8k
8
votes
What are some arguments for the golden ratio making things more aesthetically pleasing?
More often than not artists do not give arguments about using the golden ratio, they are sufficiently motivated by the long tradition of singling it out as "golden", which accumulated since ...
- 42.5k
8
votes
Isn't "modern art" kind of discriminating?
And there's no criteria for "ability to draw".
Yes there is. It's, do people want to buy it?
Consider Outsider Art, and an artist like Jean-Michel Basquiat who was widely disparaged in his ...
- 20.5k
7
votes
What did Nietzsche mean by monsters and the abyss?
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
If you engage in any kind of activity, you begin to embrace the viewpoints and facts related to the ...
- 91
7
votes
Is it ever possible to objectively state that a piece of music or film, or a genre, is better, or more artistically valid than another?
This remains an open question in philosophy. It might be possible to objectively evaluate art, but it's difficult to claim that any given attempt to do so has proven definitive. There are hundreds ...
- 27.1k
7
votes
Are there objective criteria for aesthetic judgment?
Are there objective criteria?
There have been theories discussing criteria by which to evaluate artworks; see for example the concise exploration of "Some Theories of Aesthetic Judgment" by ...
- 1,685
6
votes
Accepted
Does doing comparative philosophy presuposse adopting cultural-relativism?
As someone who works in both Modern Western philosophy and Classical Confucianism, I don't think one is required to do so when doing comparative philosophy unless you're using a very nuanced ...
- 24.6k
6
votes
Is it ever possible to objectively state that a piece of music or film, or a genre, is better, or more artistically valid than another?
There are, as @Chris Sunami has noted, many philosophical and critical forays in this direction. In addition to those mentioned, I might add the various "sociobiological" attempts to ground an ...
- 13.3k
6
votes
Accepted
Is this quote from Aristotle's Poetics?
Aristotle, Poetics, 1451b :
The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, ...
- 36.1k
6
votes
Why does my appreciation of female physical beauty tend to be presumed to be sexual?
Firstly, women are not art. Women are people.
You are not prohibited from seeing women as art. If you want to examine the female form as art, why not go to an art museum? Or join a life-drawing class?...
- 671
5
votes
Is it possible to use Wittgenstein's family resemblance approach to universals to separate high art from commercial art?
It is natural to use it, both aim at the problem of vagueness in predicates. The Sorites paradox is as ancient as the Liar, and much more pervasive, as a list of nicknames suggests: paradox of the ...
- 42.5k
5
votes
Accepted
Who has claimed that beauty is order?
Aristotle, in The Poetics, comes to mind.
Again, a beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any
whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of
parts [beginning ...
- 1,875
5
votes
Accepted
Kant and the ornament
Providing the quote for context
So, let us have a look into the text proper. I will provide a full quote of the important part of section 14 (translation and non-academy pagination from the Cambridge ...
- 13.5k
5
votes
Is art a form of communication?
Beethoven is reported to have said (my emphases)
When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher ...
- 1,434
5
votes
Accepted
What does the philosopher Bruno Latour mean when he claims that we have never been modern?
Welcome, Luna.
Interesting topic - how to take Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Modern, tr. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: 1993.
An extract from an article by Daniel Clarke Waugh (2001) ...
- 35.4k
5
votes
Does postmodernism in art criticism collapse into relativism? What's its merit?
I would not say that postmodernism is well-defined in any field and tends to resists such definition. I believe the first applications in criticism were in architecture and simply referred to the ...
- 13.3k
5
votes
Are "aesthetic experiences" limited to art and music?
Aesthetics is a sufficiently broad term, which in my opinion can by employed in everyday activities.
For example, there is a growing number of people who live their lifes as if creating a work of art. ...
- 2,143
5
votes
Are "aesthetic experiences" limited to art and music?
Aesthetics permeates everything. All value judgements are on some level aesthetic judgements, because every preference is on some level a choice of what is pleasing over what is displeasing. In the ...
- 18.5k
5
votes
Is Architecture a Language?
I have yet to see it in an answer presented, but to call architecture a language is just a metaphor. It's simply an implicit comparison, one that does not use "like" or "as". How ...
- 22.8k
5
votes
Isn't "modern art" kind of discriminating?
Art is artificial, it's something that nature wouldn't create by itself. Which is kinda oxymoronic as we are always also part of nature, so if enough people do it and if it becomes part of our ...
- 4,487
4
votes
Accepted
How might aesthetics be radically Other?
The idea of applying radical alterity to aesthetics is a partial theme of the work of Jean-Luc Marion.
He calls these sorts of things saturated phenomenon.
For him, these reach their culmination not ...
- 24.6k
4
votes
Is it ever possible to objectively state that a piece of music or film, or a genre, is better, or more artistically valid than another?
At the very least, the quality of a piece of music is not a scalar, but multi-dimensional. Even if you could objectively measure all the different components of the quality, it then depends on the ...
- 5,243
4
votes
Are there objective criteria for aesthetic judgment?
My personal belief is that there ARE objective aesthetic criteria.
But there is no one set of these criteria that is universally, or even widely accepted. There are, however innumerable competing ...
- 27.1k
4
votes
What are some arguments for the golden ratio making things more aesthetically pleasing?
There are sources to discover the Golden ratio in arts: for instance History of the Golden Ratio or Golden Ratio in Art and Architecture. From what I have learned, possible aesthetical reasons are ...
- 203
4
votes
Is the laughable person beautiful?
It's an interesting question. It will depend on your underlying theory of humor and aesthetics. I don't know any theory of humor and aesthetics that matches up the humorous person and the beautiful. ...
- 2,137
4
votes
Accepted
What does Danto mean when he writes that artworks are "embodied meanings"?
I am not familiar with Danto's work specifically, and therefore I don't know whether he was trying to distinguish between art and non-art, although I suspect that he would say that stating that a ...
- 96
4
votes
Are "aesthetic experiences" limited to art and music?
Certainly not. I once saw our Swiss sheppard dog jump out off a thin layer of mist. It was a silent and cold winter night with a full bright Moon. As she jumped up it was a beautiful sight when the ...
- 181
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