Art- Aesthetic and objective reality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

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."

Elena: I’m an ignorant on Kant but a passage like this makes me wonder if from such statements we’ve come to develop this individualism that pretends to establish that beauty is a purely subjective individual experience.

I would look at it from a different angle. There’s objective beauty and people perceive it or not according to their personal state. In a miserable state, few can perceive the objectivity of beauty. What determines whether something is beautiful or not is not people, beauty remains beautiful no matter how people perceive it, what varies is people’s condition to perceive it.

This can be applied to all of life. Life is life no matter how miserable people feel. This lack of trust in the objectivity of reality even if “reality” is an ever-changing experience, accounts for a great deal of the “depression” people are experiencing today. It’s as if we were each supposed to carry the full responsibility of our own well being without caring or connecting with external reality. All the self-healing movement seems to pretend that people heal themselves while the world around them uses and abuses them. It’s as if we pretended that we can get used and abused in our jobs and then use the money we get paid to heal our selves from the abuse because no one but our selves is responsible for being abused… which although is true on one level, it is utterly untrue in the other: we are being abused by the status quo in which some people control other people’s lives, determine how wealth is distributed and pay what they please to most while acquiring huge personal gains.

I hear people talking of the economic injustice as if that were no longer an issue to be discussed but why wouldn’t that be a central issue to be discussed? What fell with the dictatorship of communism was the dictatorship, not the need for a more balanced distribution of wealth just like what continues to be unacceptable about capitalism is that there is no democracy in it no matter how “democratic” capitalists label themselves. 


Further down the article it says: 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; therefore taste can be learned. Taste varies according to class, cultural background, and education. According to Kant, beauty is objective and universal; thus certain things are beautiful to everyone. The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities, but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations. I guess somewhere else Kant talks about that because that isn't what I get from the above paragraph, but it's good to know that we agree! "The contemporary view of beauty is not based on innate qualities but rather on cultural specifics and individual interpretations." It's interesting how the privileged classes that have made of Art their private property have established this tendency to view Art from an individualistic point of view because in doing that they can isolate themselves from those who don't agree with them. These "cultural" specifics are not casual. Concrete masses of people today tend to establish themselves as the "speakers for Art", its representatives and thrive on separating themselves from the rest of humanity who is not "refined" enough or has the money to acquire it, just revealing the extent to which the modern malady has invaded them.