4.What is the criteria that we employ when making these types of determinations? And who defines and applies that criteria?
5.What is Art’s purpose? To simply beautify our surroundings? To elicit an emotional response? To provoke thought or cerebral reactions? To make a rhetorical point or pose a rhetorical question? To compel some sort of social, political, and/or spiritual change? To allow for certain types of communication between human beings that cannot be achieved otherwise? Or to merely provide a welcome and relaxing diversion?
In attempts to answer these and related questions, we in the modern era are often ruled by Romantic1 notions of individual subjectivity, which insists that absolute criteria be displaced by a fluid relativism, leading to the slippery notion that “beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.”
But if beauty lies merely in the eye of the beholder, does it then follow that there are no native qualities or innate characteristics in the object itself that render it beautiful, regardless of our own individual gazes? Is there no such thing as a fixed set of definable standards by which we evaluate an object’s worth? If not, does it then follow that Art means whatever anybody wants it to mean? Wouldn’t that make it mean nothing?
The collision of disparate approaches to determining the artistic value of a given object can be, by turns, frustrating and futile or thrilling and rewarding, both for the creator of the object and its eventual audience—which is why it’s useful to be aware of the manner in which artists enter and navigate the creative process, and sensitive to the ways in which given audiences interpret and assess the ultimate worth of the final product.
It should also be noted that different cultures, subcultures, eras, geographical regions, religious/spiritual traditions, and self-contained artistic movements have defined and employed their own unique, idiosyncratic criteria by which they comprehend beauty and determine the value of a work of art.
Furthermore, the assumptions and expectations that distinguish one set of artistic criteria from another are not static—on the contrary, they are often fluid and dynamic, undergoing dramatic metamorphoses, even within the confines of an otherwise insular environment.
Happily, there is a field of inquiry devoted to the contemplation of these questions and the complex, nuanced ideas that accompany them: Aesthetics.
What is Aesthetics?
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to locate and define the principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty—especially in Art.
Efforts to understand what makes something beautiful have a long and storied history.
In the Western tradition, Aesthetics can be traced as far back as the early fourth century BCE. The great Greek philosopher Plato (ca. 425–347 BCE) wrote penetratingly about Beauty and Art in his famous Dialogues, which were composed intermittently across several decades.
Plato maintained an unusual set of ideas on both Art and Beauty—two concepts that he did not conflate. Plato believed that the material world we encounter each day is merely a collection of facsimiles—copies of Ideal Forms that exist in the universe. The truth—which is what Plato always searched for—is to be found in the Ideal Form, not its copy; therefore, man-made objects (like Art) can impede our connection with the truth. Plato also believed that Art, which we encounter through sensory perception, arouses our emotions in unproductive and destructive ways, contributing to our being diverted from the truth, which is why he distrusted Art, Artists, and the manner in which human beings generally experience and understand the physical world that they inhabit. Therefore, true Beauty, according to Plato, is not to be found in Art or the material world but, rather, in the purity and perfection of the fixed and universal Ideal. While Plato maintained his suspicion of Art and Artists, he never denied their power to elicit profound emotional responses from audiences, which is one of the reasons he feared their potentially damaging influence on society and what he considered to be the pillars of an ideal civilization.
Plato’s most famous student was Aristotle (384–322 BCE), whose celebrated treatise Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) is an in-depth, if somewhat elliptical, examination of Ancient Greek Tragedy, which necessarily touches upon tangential notions of Art and Beauty. While never mentioning Plato by name, Aristotle’s defense and glorification of poetic drama—and, by implication, Art in general—as a morally redemptive and emotionally cathartic enterprise can be interpreted as a direct challenge to his teacher’s earlier conclusions.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
By examining plot, structure, character, language, theme, musicality, and the visual/theatrical aspects he observed in the tragic plays of Aeschylus (525–456 BCE), Sophocles (496–406 BCE), and Euripides (480–406 BCE), Aristotle begins to define the characteristics that constitute Classical notions of greatness and artistic merit in Ancient Greek Drama. Many of these characteristics are neatly applicable to other art forms: balance, symmetry, harmony, order, nuance, suggestion, decorum, a proportional grandeur, and a sense of wholeness. The degree to which these characteristics can be located in the art of the ancient world is startling given the scope and volume of creative output in Classical Greco-Roman culture.2
The Parthenon (fifth century BCE)
In the first century BCE, the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE) wrote Ars Poetica, an extremely influential epistolary poem in which he advises young poets on the art of drama and versification. Ars Poetica provides a crisp outline of maxims that poets should consider as they compose their versified dramas. Among these are the need for unity and simplicity, calculation in the face of emotional, intellectual, and/or stylistic extremes, clear distinctions between poetic/dramatic genres, a well-honed sense of decorum with regard to language and character, and a strict adherence to a five-act structure.
Horace also believed that the purpose of poetry (read Art) is “to delight and instruct.” Notice that Horace includes a didactic component (instruct) alongside the more obvious aim of entertaining (delight) an audience or reader. Without either, the implication being, the work is not worthy to be deemed Art.
Horace also advised that the dramatic narrative should begin “in medias res,” Latin for “in the middle of things,” meaning that the action should start when the characters are already in, or close to, crisis mode, rather than “ab ovum,” Latin for “from the egg,” or the very beginning, meaning the moment of a protagonist’s conception. Horace’s advice on this point would be echoed about two thousand years later by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), who wrote that “a drama is not designed to tell the entire story of a man’s life; but, rather, to place him in a situation in which his entire being becomes clear by the way he unties the knots.”
Classical sensibilities regarding the nature and value of Art began to erode with the creeping advent of a proselytizing Christianity. In approximately 200 CE, the Christian theologian Tertullian (ca. 155–240 CE) composed a series of epistles entitled On the Spectacles, which is a scathing indictment of the moral depravity of the theatrical presentations that were both common and extremely popular in Ancient Rome. Tertullian argued that the sensual pleasures enjoyed by people attending these theatrical events (which included everything from mock
