Art and Beauty: Creation, Meaning, and Perception
Art and Beauty
Artistic creation, or the work of art, is an activity aimed at the production of beautiful objects. It is a type of symbolic action and involves both the mastery of technique and intuition.
Historical Conceptions of Art
The Western tradition elaborated the concept of art from the Aristotelian conceptions of techne or ars. In this conception, it includes, as undifferentiated, any activity or practice learned from experience.
Plato had a positive concept of art, considering it a copy of a model. For Hegel, nature was less than art.
The Work of Art
The work of art could be defined by the symbolic capacity and intuition of the artist. It is the self-expression of the genius that created it.
Artistic creation offers another vision of reality, of certain aspects of the real. Reality is penetrated with a distinct glance. Through artistic expression, we do not seek to define and materialize reality, but to grasp it experientially.
Functions of Art
The artwork also has symbolic value and other functions:
- Art as Form: The value of the artwork lies in its formal excellence.
- Art as Expression: The work of art is an expression of feelings and human values.
- Art as Symbol: The work of art performs a significative function and expresses human feelings.
Levels of Understanding Art
Philosophers distinguish two levels to explain how truth is revealed in art:
- A level of immediate perceptions, called the subject of the artwork.
- A level that captures a world of elements between sensory data (color, lines, etc.) that goes beyond simple sensory data.
The artist starts from previous materials; a material and physical form is closed. Perceiving art is grasping its unity. It is composed of viewing all elements, inherent values, and references.
Art Through History
Art has always been an expression of society, from the time of primitive peoples. The artistic expression of primitive people was collective. In the ancient world, conscience and religion developed the forms of art.
Modern and Contemporary Art
Art seems to enjoy greater freedom than in the past. This is due to various factors: greater political freedom and conscience, a wide audience, and mass society itself, able to convert everything, or almost everything, into an object of consumption.
Today, art diversifies and more clearly separates those who enjoy it, without losing its role as a political opposition. Disinterested art is given more body to a social elite, and popular art.
The Aesthetic Experience
The work of art is guided by the intuition of beauty and allows us to capture what is beautiful in the world through sensation or a set of sensations.
The aesthetic experience gives us different pleasures. Each person has privileged tastes, but the aesthetic experience is always a continuous experience.
Traits of the Aesthetic Experience
Despite this variety, one can point to these traits in the experience of beauty:
- Amazement and Contemplation: The aesthetic experience is born of wonder at the phenomenon that attracts us from the everyday.
- Disinterested Pleasure: The aesthetic phenomenon produces an admiring pleasure, not a possessive one.
- Intensity and Brevity: When the aesthetic experience reaches great intensity, it can produce an “abduction.”
Objectivism vs. Subjectivism
Why are things beautiful?
- Objectivism: Beauty is the most harmonious constituent of things.
- Subjectivism: Beauty is in humans; they project a feeling in their eyes.
The Beautiful and the Sublime
Often, various terms refer to the idea of beauty: “funny,” etc.
The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime with Kant reaches a very prominent philosophical value:
- The beautiful is a reality that is understandable and can be expressed in language through trial.
- The sublime overwhelms the human.
Today, the ugly is seen as a condemnation of a brutal world and as a possibility of a different beauty.