THE ARTS: AESTHETICS / CRITICAL THEORY

Arts: I use this term to refer to a broad range of creative disciplines and cultural practices, including Architecture, Art, Film, Literature, Music, and Popular Culture (Cultural Studies). 

The term Aesthetics (from the Greek αἰσθητική ['aisthetike']) was initially coined by the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735 to mean the "science of how things are known via the senses."  The term was not widely used in English until the late eighteenth / early nineteenth century when it began to be incorporated with Hume's discussion of the 'standards' or 'judgments of taste.'  Aesthetics was henceforth synonymous with the study of what makes something beautiful, sublime, disgusting, fun, cute, silly, entertaining, pretentious, discordant, harmonious, boring, humorous, or tragic.  It studied, in another words, what is involved in making judgments of sentiment or taste.  The term 'Aesthetics' is often used today to broadly denote "all studies of the arts and related types of experience from a philosophic, scientific, or other theoretical standpoint" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). 

I use the term Critical Theory here, not in reference to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, but in the sense of 'theory of criticism,' that is, as a term that subsumes 'film theory,' 'literary theory,' etc.  As such, it refers to interpretive approaches that emphasise the socio-historical context and rhetorical dimensions of the visual and plastic arts, their constituent elements, their effect, etc.

PHILWEB was last updated: August 26, 2008

PHILWEB is edited by Richard L. W. Clarke

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