AESTHETICS. WHAT IS ART

What is Art?

Art is the creation or expression of what is beautiful, especially in visual form; fine skill or aptitude in such expression. It is more or less an expression of experiences. It is an experience shared by men every moment of their lives.

However, art has been recognized as one of the vaguest concepts in modern time. The dimension of arts include painting, sculpture, music and dancing. Paintings are among the earliest art of historical record. The oldest painting the world is over 20,000 years old, and were discovered early this century and are pictures of hunters and animals. Sculpture is the art of creating natural or abstract forms in three dimensions either in the round or the relief. In Africa carving and sculpture are the main art. Music creates order out of chaos, for rhythm imposes compatibility upon the incongruous. Sound waves can penetrate more deeply our emotion than any other impressions. Through music we share and become part of all great occasions. Dancing is an ancient art of ordered stylized body movements coupled with leaps, measured steps and order actions, normally performed to the accompaniment of music or voices.

Theories of art

Several theories of art and beauty have evolved over the years of the long history of aesthetics. These include the theory of art as imitation; art as representation, the theory of realism. We shall briefly discuss three of the above.

Art as imitation

The theory of art as imitation is associated with Plato. He was the first to introduce the term mimesis (imitation). According to Plato, in discussion his ideal world, he states that the particular things of these world are mere imitations or resemblances of the real things in the ideal world of forms. Plato applied this in aesthetics, and posited that paintings dramatic poems and songs, indeed all works of arts are images. He then places work of art at a second lower level from the reality of the forms; thus work of art are an imitation of the particular things of the world of sense which are themselves imitations of the reality of the forms. Work of art are for Plato, deceptive semblances.

Art as representation

Another theory of art states that art can quite literally be said to represent objects in the world.  Without question obviously, many works of painting, sculpture and other visual arts do clearly represent objects, but the sense in which they do this is not always the same. There is a difference between depicting an object and portraying it. For instance, a painting of a dark man clad in a toga, we would say the painting depicts a dark man clad in toga. But the same painting may also be said to represent Julius Caesar- that is, it may be said to portray Julius Caesar.

The theory of art as representation runs into trouble in regard to the art of music. Nature does not produce musical sounds; these are produced only by man-made instruments. Nature does presents us with sounds but these are primarily noises rather musical tones and music is composed not of noise but of musical tones. Music, then, presents us with wide variety of musical sounds which do not, however, represent.  Literature, too as the index of art may not pass as representation, in the way painting or sculpture could. There is no particular point in distinguishing between depiction and portrayal in literature.

The theory of realism

The theory of aesthetic realism holds that aesthetic qualities are inherent in the aesthetic object and objective, as opposed to the view that aesthetic appreciation is subjective and dependent on the emotions or feelings of the perceiver of an aesthetic object. This theory has been developed in literature by Zola. For Realism, all art is seen as a reproduction of factual reality or as a bearer of concrete social ideas.

Relationship between Art and Beauty

Beauty is not synonymous with art but it is endlessly related with it. There is some sort of intimate, even symbiotic connection between the two. It is hard to imagine art without beauty, nor even without its antithesis, ugliness.

Plato and Aristotle thought that beauty and harmony were the main subject of art. But must great art be beautiful? What about a painting like Picasso Guernica? It is rightly accepted as a great painting. But many who think it is great would not say it is beautiful. It is actually easy to agree that Guernica is great art, and agree that it is not beautiful, without rejecting beauty as the defining characteristics of art. A piece like Guernica derives its power in part from ugliness and distortion, these qualities are opposites of beauty; so the beautiful and ugly may still be the main features that drive us to such work as this.

Kant understood art as the beautiful representation of some form, and through it the representation of an aesthetic idea which lies beyond the realm of the concepts and categories. By this, the artist infinitely expands a given concept and, thus encouraging the free play of our mental faculties. This implies that art really lies beyond the realm of reason and that the beautiful is conceptually incomprehensible.

Heidegger, in his phenomenological perspective, see art as the becoming and happening of truth. Beauty is one way in which truth appears as unconcealment. Beauty is the unconcealednes of that which is as something that is. Beauty is the truth of being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work of art, beauty appears. Appearance- as the being of truth in the work and as work- is beauty. Thus the beautiful belong to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place.

In his Poetics, Aristotle defines art as imitation, but he is not so naïve as to call for imitation of nature, but rather of ‘men in action’. Here Aristotle takes a balance approach, and does not attempt to reduce art, or the measure of art to any one thing. In particular, he does not propose any notion of beauty as the measure of art, but rather introduces a number of quality criteria, concentrating on the example of tragic drama but also discusses several other art form e.g. lyre playing. It seems that for Aristotle, as for many contemporary artists, beauty is at most a secondary concern.

To align with Aristotle, beauty is even more difficult to define than art, as well as being even more culturally relative and time-variant.

A subtle distinction between Aristotle and Plato concerning the idea of art.

Ancient Greek thought held that poetry, dram and other forms of fine art were imitations of reality, a reality that could be actual or potential. Indeed their phrase of what we think of ‘fine arts’ was ‘imitative arts’ and great importance was attached to poetry as an integral part of the Greek education. Both Plato and Aristotle agree to an extent that art is mimesis (imitation)- but they disagree on a lot things in this idea. Because Plato and Aristotle’s theories on nature and reality were widely different, so were their ideas on the mechanism of imitation. Their differing views on mimesis, as outlined principally in the Republic and the Poetics, were thus partly a consequence of their differences in their ontological and epistemological views of the world.

In the Republic, Plato gives reasons why he considers art as bad- we shall summarize the problems he sees in imitative art in three perspectives; epistemological, theological, moral and psychological perspectives. In Book II of the Republic, Plato argues that poets and other artists represent the gods in inappropriate ways. He condemns much of the poetry as lies and still further because their lie are not attractive. Many of their stories are not imitations of any reality but are outright falsities, on the ground that since gods and heroes are by definition better than men, they cannot perform such atrocious acts as shown. Such portrayals provide justification for men to commit such acts themselves. And therefore, these representation of gods and heroes are harmful to the general populace.

Epistemologically speaking, Plato argues in book X that all imitative arts seem to him ruinous to the mental powers of all their hearers. An imitation I at three times removed from the reality of truth of something. You call him who is not in direct contact with nature an imitator. Furthermore, an imitator, being so far removed from the truth, can have little knowledge of what he imitates so can thus have little conception of the inherent goodness or badness of his work.

On the moral and psychological basis, Plato argues that a good imitation can undermine the stability of even the best humans by making us feel sad, depressed and sorrowful about life itself. In order to produce pleasure poets must of necessity imitate the disturbed and unsettled character, and so the poet sets up a badly governed stat in the soul of each individual which thus corrupts the state if practice on the wide scale (the political scale being the prime concern of Plato).

In Poetics, Aristotle examines poetry on its own terms- paying much more attention to such aspects as genres and specific metres than did Plato. Like Plato, he considers all arts a form of mimesis, though Aristotle’s use of the term differs greatly from that of his former teacher. In Poetic VI, he claims that man is very imitative and obtains his first knowledge by imitation, and that everybody takes pleasure in imitation. Aristotle argues that poetry imitates men in action, a dynamic basis, not a static one as Plato held. Aristotle says that generally, art partly completes what nature cannot bring to finish and partly imitates her. As well art and nature imply each other. Here arts may be taken to mean the various useful arts or crafts (e.g, shipbuilding) and by extension the fine arts (e.g. painting). The distinction between these two was out fully by Aristotle. Useful art completes nature by supplying the deficiencies in the sense that they move further along the teleological chain to realize an end. Fine arts, such as poetry, rather imitate nature, in the sense that they do not complete her, as do the useful arts, but imitate the teleological process whereby nature moves towards a specific end.

Tragedy is the imitation of certain kinds of people and actions. Good tragedy must have certain sorts of people and plots (good people experience a reversal of fortune due to some failing of harmatia). A successful tragedy produces a catharsis in the audience (catharsis, that is, a purification through pity and fear.