Aesthetics and Artistic Thought: Theories of Art, Beauty, Creativity and the Role of the Artist
This domain asks you to argue: what is art, why is something beautiful, who decides, and what the artist is for. Expect definitions and short essays.
Key positions
- Plato: mimesis as a copy of a copy; art deceives, hence the poets are banished from the ideal Republic.
- Aristotle (Poetics): mimesis is natural and cognitive; tragedy purges the emotions - catharsis.
- Medieval: beauty as proportion and light; Aquinas - integritas, consonantia, claritas.
- Baumgarten coins "aesthetics" (Aesthetica, 1750) as the science of sensory knowledge.
- Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790): taste is disinterested, subjectively universal, purposive without purpose; genius gives the rule to art; the sublime overwhelms the imagination.
- Hegel: art as the sensuous appearance of the Idea; the symbolic–classical–romantic sequence; the "end of art" thesis.
- Nietzsche (1872): Apollonian form against Dionysian intoxication.
- Twentieth century: formalism (Wölfflin, Fry, Greenberg); Croce's intuition-expression; Benjamin's aura and mechanical reproduction (1935); Barthes' death of the author (1967); Danto's "artworld" (1964) and Dickie's institutional theory (1974); Bourdieu's habitus and cultural capital (1979).
- Creativity: the romantic genius versus process models - Wallas (1926): preparation, incubation, illumination, verification.
- Role of the artist: anonymous artisan → named Renaissance author → academic professional → avant-garde provocateur → contemporary producer and researcher.
Worked example
Question: "Why can a urinal be art?" A Kantian answer fails: there is no disinterested beauty in a manufactured object. An institutional answer works: Danto and Dickie hold that art is what the artworld - artists, critics, museums, theory - treats as art. Then add a critical note: the institutional theory explains the frame but not the value, and Benjamin's aura argument explains why the gesture shocked in 1917 and no longer does. That layered answer earns the marks.
Traps that cost marks
- Crediting Kant with coining "aesthetics" (it is Baumgarten, 1750).
- Translating catharsis as moral improvement.
- Reading Hegel's "end of art" as literally no more art being made.
- Offering personal opinion without naming the theory that supports it.