Short Definition of Art and Aesthetics

AESTHETICS

“A set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty.” Also, “the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste.”

The definition of aesthetic, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is: of or relating to art or beauty.

 

According to Oxford Dictionaries, an aesthetic is “a set of principles underlying the work of a particular artist or artistic movement”, such as the Cubist aesthetic. As such, aesthetic theory is often divided into branches such as art theory, film theory, and music theory.  

The word aesthetic is derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός (aisthetikos, meaning "sensitive, perceptive"), and had originally been used merely to mean “sensibility” or “responsiveness to stimulation of the senses”. It received its contemporary meaning of “taste” or “sense” of beauty by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.

The German philosopher first introduced the concept of good and bad “taste” (and as such, good and bad art) in his book Die Metaphysik. He defined “taste” as the ability to judge according to the senses, instead of according to the intellect.

Originally published in Latin in 1739, his concept received a lot of criticism from other philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, though the latter eventually came to conform to Baumgarten’s usage of the word and himself employed the word aesthetic to mean the judgment of taste or the estimation of the beautiful.

ART

Generally, art (or “fine art”) is when the artist’s skill is used to express his or her creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities. 

If this skill is being used in a functional object, it is more likely to be considered a craft rather than art; when the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art, though the term “applied art” may also be appropriate. 

Typically, art implies no function other than to please the eye or communicate an idea.

For many centuries it was implied that all art aims at beauty, but art movements such as Cubism and Dadaism struggled against the conception that beauty is central to the definition of art – with great success. 

After the works of such artists as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol one could believe that “art” is basically a sociological category, and that whatever art schools, museums and artists define as art is considered such regardless of formal definitions. After all, most people didn’t consider the depiction of a store-bought urinal or Brillo Box to be art until Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol (respectively) placed them in the context of art (i.e. the art gallery), which then provided the association of these objects with the associations that define art. 

However, there are other possible definitions, such as that suggested by proceduralists: That it is the process by which a work of art is created or viewed that makes it art, not any inherent feature of an object, or how well received it is by the institutions of the art world after its introduction to society at large. Leo Tolstoy, on the other hand, claims in “What is art?” (1897) that what decides whether or not something is art is how it is experienced by its audience, not by the intention of its creator. 

There are a number of other theories, ranging from the practical (the instrumentalist theory of art, Monroe Beardsley) to the obscure (“Art is an anti-destiny”, André Malraux). In general, one can agree that the definition of art is limited by both era and culture.