Talk:Aesthetics/Archive 1

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Contents

(Comments from 2003–2004)

Should mention surrealist automatism as suppressive of aesthetics. --Daniel C. Boyer

To be merged, from Philosophy of art (now a redirect):

Philosophy of art (aesthetics) discusses about questions like "What is beauty ?" . Benedetto Croce (who was with Giovani Gentile the theoretitions of Fascism and later became the opposite of Mussulini's regime) is one of the most important features of this area.He believed that art is superior than science.

-- Merphant 23:25 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)

---

Someone's aesthetic has a lot to do with their artistic judgement. For example, an individual who wears flowered clothing, drives a flowered car, and paints their home with flowers has a particular aesthetic.

I disagree; "aesthetic" is not a synonym for "style".

Brianshapiro

I did some major re-editing moving things around, removed one superfluous paragraph, and added sections for various mediums where aesthetics are relevant. I'm pretty much tapped-out for ideas, although we could certainly expand the sections with some nice graphics and more links. Anyhow I yield to the rest of the WikiPeida community.

I added a Disclaimer section at the bottom, and although I intend to fill it out, I may not get around to it until Feb 2004. I'd welcome any ideas (here in Talk:Aesthetics) as to what might be appropriate.

Best,
-- Jeff

Hi Jeff, why not move the discussion at the bottom of the article to this page? It seems kind of weird having a bunch of boilerplate stuff sitting there. So, my idea is to move that to this page and come back to it later. MShonle 06:59, 22 Jan 2004 (UTC)

OK, no takers, here's what's was on the bottom of the page. Would love to see it on the main page again, but only when it's edited. "Until Feb 2004" might be a lot longer than that! MShonle 02:55, 24 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Hello Mshonle, I agree -- the page reads better without the disclaimer. I'm still rolling around in my brain what to do with regard to actual artists who might visit this page... I feel it is somewhat counterproductive or distracting to an artist; I might end up making a separate "living page" titled Artistic Spiritual Resouces (or some other nonsense). Thanks for the edit,
-- Jeff 14:09, 25 Jan 2004

below here is still under construction; see Talk:Aesthetics

Disclaimer

A craftsperson or artisan differs from an artist in how they approach their creative activities. Learn what values of each aesthetic element appeals to those people in the culture you are touching: this makes you a better artisan. An artist, however, creates from a different foundation; sometimes they are driven by a muse, they often experiment like children, can be overtaken by their imagination, they disturb, and they use their art to liberate their own souls from the slings and arrows of their own personal life.

If you are an artist visiting this page, you might also like to read the WikiPedia pages about a, b, c, d, e, and f. You might also visit some of these external links:

link1 link2

The links aren't working... :(

Yep you have got it very mixed up from the point of view of the artist. firstly the realms of artist and craftsperson both deal with aesthetics - so there really is no need to get concerned about the professional differences here, is there?
secondly - the terms artisan, craftsperson and artist are hotly contested, but not along the lines that you have described. i think you are trying to say that a craftsperson thinks about an audience while an artist just seems to ignore everybody else. think about that for a moment. and then consider why a craftsperson tends to be associated with making furniture and jewellery while artists are credited with encapsulating a whole cultures zeitgeist. No they both think about an audience and when they are good they both have a very subtle sense of aesthetic and how to manipulate other peoples emotional responses. The difference lies more in the nature of the problems they are trying to solve.
Now whether you subscribe to one or other being more noble than the other is a highly political issue and suprise, suprise, the terms artist and craftsperson have been given to us through a protracted political portrayal stretching back hundreds of years. to cut a long story short Artist as a word is the champion of the right while craftsperson is a term favoured by the left, implying the nobility of the person who grafts with thier hands and all that that implies. even prior to that there is an issue with the word craft itself, which meant power (it still does in germany where it originated, Kraftwerk = power station). the poor old kraft workers were even being relegated in the middle ages, only then the term was more often associated with witchcraft.
I'm sorry that the artists that you seem to have come into contact with all seem to be working out some kind of personal gestalt, perhaps they are merely in denial about thier need for therapy.

DavidP 02:39, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Garbage dump

The stuff below does not add to the discussion; just because you happen to be a Moslem or an Objctivist is no reason to think a paragraph from your own special point of view is required. I suggest we stay on-topic, this article is a big enough mess as it is.

This study of aesthetics is well-developed in theology, e.g. "water, greenery, and a beautiful face" were identified by Muhammad, founder and Prophet of Islam, as the key things that any person could differentiate from the background.

It is particularly important to the study of the individual's moral core, which is formed by epigenetics and examples through his or her lifetime, but has a common human foundation explored in cognitive science, anthropology and primatology.


The theory of surrealist automatism is extra-aesthetic in that it is supposed to be practiced without (conscious) moral or aesthetic self-censorship.

The writer Ayn Rand assumed a hierarchical nature of philosophy that builds in complexity & dependence from metaphysics through epistemology, ethics & politics to aesthetics ("Philosophy, Who Needs It?", 1974).

An artist just dropped in

And there i was thinking that this page was doing OK - in a rather uncommited way, when i found you were all worrying about what to do when an artist read what you were saying. you were right it is annoying looking at pages written by people that are role playing, but I dont think there is a problem.

the answer is why bother getting wrapped up in art at all?

it has its own wiki page, as does, visual art, craftsperson. beauty etc. aesthetics is, as you point out, an issue of perception - just leave it at that! and let the specific pages deal with those other things.

so how do you avoid refering to art? - just get rid of the highly dubious para that Brianshapiro has a prob with too.

this one

Someone's aesthetic has a lot to do with their artistic judgement. For example, an individual who wears flowered clothing, drives a flowered car, and paints their home with flowers has a particular aesthetic.

I was about to change it thinking that artistic judgement was a highly dubious nothingness, and considered taste, or style when i read Brianshapiro's comment and tried replacing it with the top definition - like so:

Someones that which appeals to the senses. has a lot to do with their... what... erm... senses?

And then what follows

Generally, art adheres to the aesthetic principles of symmetry/asymmetry, focal point, pattern, contrast, perspective, 3D dimensionality, movement, rhythm, unity/Gestalt, and proportion.

suddenly we are on an art page - or to be more precise a Visual Art page. lets have a list of aesthetic principles instead and the next bit is giving us a rather shambolic lesson in art criticism.

One cannot take a sample of artwork, lay it down, critique it across aesthetic dimensions, and reach some kind of quantitative judgement as to its quality. Great paintings touch our souls; they may violate some guidelines or lend different weights to various aesthetic principles (sometimes a piece of art veers violently from an aesthetic principle specifically for effect; the "anti-art" Dadaist movement deliberately violated as many artistic principles as possible). Yet the principle of aesthetics gives us a basis for discussion.

Quality isn't an issue in "that which appeals to our senses" as much as depth of appeal, and you could argue that no painting appeals as much as the sublime sight of a massive stone cliff being eroded by storm tossed seas in a hurricane, we should try and leave art out of it here.

sorry to rant - why dont I just go and make some changes and see what you reckon.

DavidP 03:12, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is this a Philosophy article or not??

I'm taking a Philosophy of Aesthetics course at the moment and there is nothing in this article that even resembles the material I'm learning. If this is a philosophy article then there should be a survey of the major philsophical authors in the field, linking to their own articles which go into further detail. This survery and analysis may be most appropriately organized chronologically (begrudgingly beginning with Plato, of course). Also, the way the article organized is not representative of the field of aesthetics, which mainly discusses principles relating to all forms of art. Please let me know what you think before I start to make bold changes!--Slac 00:38, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

I am not a philosophy student but I couldn't agree more, I came to the talk page to suggest the same. Best of luck with your bold editing -- Tedneeman 04:25, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
I am interested in philosophy (I found this article through links from WikiProject Philosophy). I think that the paragraphs entitled 'aesthetics in [some field]' are okay as far as they go, but that the article could use a better overall structure, and that those paragraphs should probably be left in at the bottom. I agree the main article should be about aesthetics in philosophy, which is totally lacking at the moment. I look forward to seeing upcoming changes. WhiteC 20:34, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Clean up

I took out the following section titles:

Ancient Greece, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, 18th Century, Kant, Hume, 19th Century, Hegel, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, 20th Century, Clive Bell, R. G. Collinwood, John Dewey, Susanne Langer, Arthur Danto

None of them contained anything, though a few were marked as stubs. Leaving section headings followed by nothing is messy and meaningless. We need information about these sections, not just their titles. For that matter, this whole article needs to be cleaned up and improved, IMO - J.S. Nelson 5 July 2005 01:55 (UTC)

Yeah, no kidding. Forgive me for adding those empty sections, which were basically desperate cries for assistance. --Slac 5 July 2005 04:58 (UTC)

Yes, the article needs a major rewrite by an expert. Knowing nothing of this topic, I came here via the Philosophy of art redirect hoping to get an overview, but the material here seems to cover only one small aspect. Slac's contention that the article covers little of what's in a typical philosophy of aesthetics course is borne out by for example [1] which describes the content of a text on the subject. I'll put a cleanup tag on the article in the hope of attracting the attention of someone who can do it justice. -- JimR 10:37, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

New Heading

Greek Speculations - "Ancient Greece supplies us with the first important contributions to aesthetic theory, though these are scarcely, in quality or in quantity, what one might have expected from a people which had so high an appreciation of beauty and so strong a bent for philosophic speculation. The first Greek thinker of whose views on the subject we really know something is Socrates. We learn from Xenophon's account of him that he regarded the beautiful as coincident with the good, and both of them are resolvable into the useful. Every beautiful object is so called because it serves came rational end, whether the security or the gratification of man. Socrates appears to have attached little importance to the immediate gratification which a beautiful object affords to perception and contemplation, but to have emphasized rather its power of furthering the more necessary ends of life. The really valuable point in his doctrine is the relativity of beauty. Unlike Plato, he recognized no self-beauty (auto to kalon) existing absolutely and out of all relation to a percipient mind." --From the 1911 Encyclopedia (Public Domain)

Would this section be appropriate? The same encyclopedia also has entries for Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Famous German philosophers also each get a section. If it gets used then the template "open curly open curly 1911 close curly close curly" should be included. See my talk page for more of the 1911 entry. Jeff 23:47, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

1911 Britannica as a starting point

Might it be a good idea to replace the current article entirely with the 1911 one, then make whatever changes are necessary to incorporate modern developments? That article is quite well done and treats many subtle points that we're missing here. inkling 05:22, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

  • This sounds a good idea, inkling! Major surgery like this is required, in my opinion. But could we see the text from the 1911 if you have it downloaded already (e.g. from [2])? Maybe you could post it here for consideration, and if people agree it can be moved to the article page, perhaps in conjunction with moving the content of the existing article to here on the Talk page. -- JimR 06:43, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
  • Thanks Jeffmilner for posting it (see just below), though seeing it, I'm not sure if my idea of having it here on the talk page was the best approach. It's more informative than the present page, though the style is old fashioned; it's long; and wow, it will need a lot of work. I propose that we move it to say /Brit1911 which will be a subpage of this talk page: this seems to be allowed, according to WP:SP#Allowed uses number 1. Then it will stand by itself, and we can work on it to correct the scanning errors, remove the newlines, and wikify — and update it, if anyone has the necessary knowledge. Then once it's up to scratch we can replace the existing article with it (we'd probably want to save the current version here on the talk page). Does anyone dislike this suggestion? -- JimR 09:43, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
Since no one has objected, I've now created /Brit1911 as I proposed, and will do some work on it, I hope with other people's help. -- JimR 06:29, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
TimNelson 10:05, 8 January 2006 (UTC) -- People have talked about replacing the article. I think it would be better to put the Brit1911 was tacked on to the end of the section labelled "Aesthetics in History and Philosophy". The stuff currently on Wikipedia is good, but it's an entirely different categorisation system, which is why it doesn't resemble what people are studying. If this is what we decide to do, we'll have to promote the headings on the current Aesthetics page, and demote the headings on the Brit1911 one.

There may be drawbacks in inserting /Brit1911 into Aesthetics: the result would be extremely long, and there would be a glaring clash of styles between the Britannica's tone and the modern article. Instead, what would people think of moving /Brit1911 to say History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century) or Aesthetics (history pre-1900), and linking it prominently from a suitable place in the main article? -- JimR 04:54, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Nobody has opposed this suggestion, so I've moved the Britannica material to History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century) and linked it from Aesthetics#See also. -- JimR 03:41, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

this should be easier 4 9yr olds to understand

How so? How is it difficult to understand. Also, please Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages. Hyacinth 10:04, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

The second sentence of this article needs serious work

"Any person's aesthetic response to a work of art will be unique to that individual, but many aesthetic principles can be identified and used by the creator of the work to achieve specific aesthetic effects."

1) How is an "aesthetic response" different from a generic "response"? This is not clear from the introductory paragraph.

2) Saying that "many aesthetic principles can be identified and used by the creator of the work to achieve specific aesthetic effects" seems meaningless. I could substitute any other word for "aesthetic" in this phrase, and have an equivalent statement. Ex: "many scientific principles can be identified and used by the creator of the work to achieve specific scientific effects". It may (or may not) be true, but it doesn't help you understand what "aesthetic" means.

I thought I would post these comments here, rather than simply deleting the sentence in question, in the hope that someone might be able to do something with it. I think aesthetics can be useful, but I really don't think this sentence is helpful in explaining it. WhiteC 02:16, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

No defenders... I cut it out. WhiteC 05:27, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy aesthetics article is excellent

I just finished reading the aesthetics article on The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is far superior to this Wikipedia article. Anyone interested in making improvements might consider using this resource as a guide. --Gavin 15:16, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Aesthetics vs. Aesthetic

Hi all. I came here looking for "Aesthetic", the noun, not "Aesthetic" the adjective. The word "Aesthetic" redirects here to "Aesthetics" (and rightly so).

An example of the difference:

  1. (adjective) relating to or dealing with the subject of aesthetics; "aesthetic values"
  2. (noun) (philosophy) a philosophical theory as to what is beautiful; "he despised the esthetic of minimalism"

(lines above taken from Googling "define:aesthetic"). I'd been reading about Cool, which is defined on the Cool disambiguation page as an African philosophy and aesthetic. I came here to try to answer the questions "What is an aesthetic?" (the noun), for which I had to go to Google to get the above definition, and "What other aesthetics are there" (which, now that I know the meaning of Aesthetic (noun), can be rephrased as "What different theories of the attractive are there", with "Cool" being one of these. I've attempted to answer these, by defining "Aesthetic" as separate from Aesthetics at the top of the page, and by adding the "Schools of Aesthetics" section. Unfortundately I only had one entry for that list (and the discussion page for that article shows some controversy); if anyone has anything different to add, please feel free. TimNelson 09:47, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Offline Rewrite

In response to numerous comments, I am taking a couple of days to run a major copyedit of the article OFFLINE; I will also incorporate some elements from the 1911 Britannica history. I should slightly simplify the language as well (shooting for an 11th grade audience).

Note that any changes made ONLINE to the article between now and the update will be lost.

JeffC 15:05, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks: a good edit, incorporating some of the 1911 history already at History of aesthetics (pre-20th-century), will be very worthwhile. Note that you can use {{inuse}} as a standard way of indicating that you are working on the page offline. -- JimR 05:33, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Summary of Copyedit changes

→ A couple of sections had Definitions of the word Aesthetic; I combined these into a top "Definition" section;

→ I added in some of the Britannica info into the existing History and Philosophy section, arranging it more chronologically with sub-section headings. As the first couple paragraphs of the Visual Arts section appeared to talk about Modern views on Aesthetic philosophy, I moved those paragraphs from Visual Arts to the Philosophy section;

→ I removed many of the wikified words leaving primarily propper nouns and large concepts wikifield;

→ I combined the sections of Information Technology and Digital Aesthetics;

→ The Mathematics section had a tone as if it were trying to justify the beauty in math. We already accept that; I repurposed the section to try to delinieate the aesthetic elements of said beauty;

→ Various grammar and clarity corrections.

JeffC 17:03, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

What About Personal Beauty?

Certainly people apply aesthetic values to their own personal hygiene and beauty. In what section should we discuss this? Is Personal Aesthetics an Art, Science, or Engineering?

JeffC 12:37, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Talk Note

I removed older notes in the Talk page that are no longer relevant.

JeffC 12:37, 14 February 2006 (UTC)