Aesthetics

What it asks

Aesthetics began with a question about experience: what is happening when something strikes us as beautiful, and why do we expect other people to agree?

It has since acquired a second question that has largely displaced the first. A urinal in a gallery, four minutes of silence, a shark in formaldehyde - each was presented as art and each provoked the same response, that this is not art. Answering that requires saying what art is, and two centuries of theories that define it by beauty, by skill or by representation are all defeated by ordinary twentieth-century examples.

The recurring problems

Whether taste can be argued about. Judgements of beauty feel like reports of a property in the object, but they cannot be settled the way factual disagreements can. Hume and Kant both took this as the central puzzle and neither thought calling it subjective disposed of it.

The definition of art. Every proposed necessary condition has a counterexample, and the strongest current answers give up on properties of the object altogether and locate art in institutions, intentions or history.

Whether the work's origins matter. A forgery indistinguishable from the original is worth vastly less. Either the difference is aesthetic, which is hard to defend, or aesthetic value is not all the value a work has.

The moral question. Some great works are morally repellent, and some are propaganda for things worth opposing. Whether that counts against them AS ART divides the field.

How it developed

The ancient discussion is about beauty and about imitation, not about art as a category - the Greeks had no word that groups painting with poetry and excludes carpentry.

The eighteenth century assembled that category and gave it a philosophy. Hume argued in 1757 that the standard of taste lies in the verdicts of qualified critics rather than in the object. Kant argued in 1790 that a judgement of beauty is disinterested and claims universal agreement without being able to compel it, which remains the most influential account anyone has given.

Hegel then made art historical, a stage in the development of spirit rather than a fixed kind of thing - the move that makes it possible to say that what counts as art changes.

The twentieth century tested all of it against practice. Duchamp's readymades in 1917 and after did more to shape the field than any argument, and Arthur Danto's response in 1964, that what makes something art is an atmosphere of theory and a history that the eye cannot see, set the terms of the current debate.

The positions within it

Formalism locates aesthetic value in the arrangement of the work itself. The institutional theory locates art-status in the practices of the artworld. Expression theories make art the communication of feeling, and aesthetic empiricism insists that everything relevant is available to the senses. All are treated in the Schools section.

The deepest division is between those who think there is a property, beauty, that things have, and those who think there is only a kind of response that things provoke.

Where it stands now

The definitional question has cooled, partly through exhaustion and partly because the strongest positions now hold that art has no definition and does not need one.

The growth is in everyday aesthetics - the aesthetics of food, of landscape, of design, of ordinary objects - and in the aesthetics of nature, which the field ignored for two centuries while treating art as its whole subject. The moral question has also returned, driven by disputes about works whose makers or content are found intolerable.