2 - Estetica

STORIA E CRITICA DEL DESIGN CONTEMPORANEO
Tutor: Francesca Sorgato

Storia e Critica del Design Contemporaneo
AESTHETICS
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy

devoted to conceptual and theoretical inquiry
into art and aesthetic experience.
Art might be conceived as a practice in which

persons aim to make objects that possess
valuable aesthetic properties, or that are apt to
give subjects valuable aesthetic experiences.
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Some major concerns of aesthetics

are:
1. the aesthetics of
nature;
2. the theory of
criticism;
3. the nature of craft.

1. The aesthetics of nature can be

understood to concern itself either with certain
distinctive properties of natural phenomena that can
be classified as aesthetic, e.g. beauty, sublimity,
grandeur, or profusion, or with certain kinds of
experience distinctively provoked by nature, or
certain kinds of attitudes appropriately brought to
nature.

2. The theory of criticism can be

understood as a study of part of the practice of art:
that part concerned with the reception of
artworks, including their description,
interpretation, and evaluation

3. And craft can be readily

conceived as art-related or quasi-
artistic activity.

ART
One conception of art sees it as specially

concerned with perceptible form, with the
exploration and contemplation of such form
for its own sake. This view has roots in the
work of the eighteenth-century German
philosopher Immanuel Kant, who thought
that the beauty of objects, artworks and
natural phenomena alike, consisted in their
ability to stimulate the free play of the
cognitive faculties in virtue of their pure
forms, both spatial and temporal, and
without the mediation of concepts.

Another conception of art of long standing

sees it as essentially a vehicle
of expression or of communication,
especially of states of mind. The early
twentieth-century Italian philosopher
Benedetto Croce located the essence of art
in the expression of emotion..

A third conception of art sees it as tied

to the mimesis,
imitation,or representation of the
external world, perhaps in distinctive
ways or by distinctive means.
This conception of art has very deep

roots, and can be located, though with
some anachronism, in the earliest works
in the canon of
aesthetics,the Republic of Plato and
the Poetics of Aristotle.

Other important conceptions of art regard it

as an activity aimed explicitly at the
creation of beautiful objects, including
faithful representations of natural and
human beauty; as an arena for the
exhibition of skill, particularly skill in the
fashioning or manipulating of objects that
is capable of exciting admiration.

Some more recent conceptions of art view it

as the production of objects intended or
designed to afford aesthetic experience; as
the investing of objects with aboutness or
meaning in the context of a specific cultural
framework, the artworld; as a particular
social institution, identified by its
constituent rules and roles; or as activity
only historically identifiable as art through a
connection to earlier activities or objects
whose art status is assumed.

THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE
Among the marks that have been proposed as

distinguishing aesthetic states of mind from others
are: disinterestedness, or detachment from desires,
needs and practical concerns; non-instrumentality,
or being undertaken or sustained for their own
sake; contemplative or absorbed character, with
consequent effacement of the subject; focus on an
object's form; focus on the relation between an
object's form and its content or character; focus on
the aesthetic features of an object; and figuring
centrally in the appreciation of works of art.

PLATO’S AESTHETICS
428-347 B.C.
We have a general idea of what a work of art is:

everybody has had the experience of a work of art
and every-body can recognize a work of art when
they see one, even if they have no idea of what art is.
In front of a painting, or a building considered today
as a work of art, an ancient Greek or Roman would
only see the result of the activity of an artisan.

In ancient Greece there were works

of art, and there was the experience
of the work of art, but this
experience was not related to
categories such as “beauty ” or
“aesthetic quality.”

The activity of producing “works” (now we

say: “of art”) was called techne. We might
translate this as ability or cleverness to
create useful things. The “artist” (referred to
as technites) was a “craftsman” or an
“artisan.” Plato does not pres-ent any
“philosophy of art.”

We have to bear in mind that art was above all

tragedy and the dramatic arts, so that when
Greeks spoke of imitation (mimesis) they
referred first of all to acting on the stage with
music and words. Then there was another kind
of imitation, derived from this one, which was
the activity of painters and sculptors.
It was not an art but rather a practical skill.
Poetry was not a practical and individual skill
but a kind of divine frenzy given by the gods.

According to Plato, each object of the material world is a

copy of an immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchangeable and
unique form. Material reality is nothing but an imitation of
the immaterial world of forms, a world which exists
“beyond the sky” (hyperouranios). This is the true reality of
things. Forms (or ideas) are models or archetypes of material
things.

Things we meet in our everyday experience are nothing but an imitation of the full reality of
forms. The real world is the world of perfect, eternal and immaterial forms, not the one of
everyday experience. Truth is only known by means of intellectual knowledge. Materiality is
essentially bad and far away from the truth.

A work of art is an imitation of reality. The artist

paints a table and makes a copy of a material
table which is already a copy of the immaterial
form. The work of art is a copy of a copy, it is
two times removed from reality, and is therefore
a deception.

According to Plato, art is false knowledge

of reality.
An artist’s imitation can deceive common
people, not the philosopher, who knows the
essence of reality or the real being of things.

ARISTOTLE’S AESTHETICS
384-322 B.C.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) has no ontological

condemnation for art. He does not think, as Plato
did, that there is an ideal order of reality (forms)
and a lower order of reality (material things), and
that truth and values of the second (material
reality) are given by the first (forms).
Consequently, Aristotle has no moral
condemnation for art either.

Aristotle starts from the actual experience of poetry and affirms that art is imitation. Where then
does our instinct for imitation come from? It is found in human nature.

“It is clear that the general origin of

poetry was due to two causes, each of
them part of human nature. Imitation
is natural to man from childhood, one
of his advantages over the lower
animals being this, that he is the most
imitative creature in the world, and
learns at first by imitation.”

“And it is also natural for all to delight in

works of imitation. The truth of this second
point is shown by experience: though the
objects themselves may be painful to see, we
delight to view the most realistic
representation of them in art, the forms for
example of the lowest animals and of dead
bodies. The explanation is to be found in a
further fact: to be learning something is the
greatest of pleasures not only to the
philosopher but also to the rest of mankind,
however small their capacities for it.”

We take delight or pleasure in watching an

imitation, even if it is an imitation of a
thing in which we would not take any
delight in watching in real life. We take
delight in seeing an imitation of something
or, if we do not know the original, we are
delighted to see the good execution of the
work.

In both cases we know 1) that it is an

imitation and it is not a real thing, and we
know 2) that it does not belong to real life,
that this imitation does not affect us as a
real thing, so that we keep a distance from
the imitation.

We know that we are experiencing

a work of art. This cognitive
experience is part of the pleasure
of the work of art as such. I can
take pleasure in the experience of
a work of art only if I know that it
is an imitation of reality.

In his Poetics Aristotle offers a

treatise on poetics as an activity to
produce tragedies. This activity is a
techne, a practical activity, whose
aim is to create works of art.
For the first time in the history of
Western thought we have a technical
treatise upon art, as an activity
different from philosophy or politics
or persuasion or any other kind of
knowledge.

Catharsis is a metaphor used by Aristotle to

describe how audience of a tragedy is
effected, lay people automatically tend to
associate the concept of catharsisto the
realmof theatre.
The aim of this work is to reveal the strong
connection between the event of catharsis
and any form of art, given art is a form of
purification.

A discourse on art assumes that there

must be an object, which could be a
book, a painting, music,
performance that brings at least two
people together: the artist and their
audience therefore the artistic object
becomes a social object.
Art needs to generate knowledge
albeit at an unconscious level.

Art becomes an object capable of infusing

emotions, which can become ideas, through
perceptual apparatus. It is based on imitation
and even when it is abstract it infuses, and
therefore imitates, the artist’s image of life
projecting it into the art object.

THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN KANT

1724- 1804
In Kant, the argument on aesthetic judgment

starts with defining the concept of beauty. The
initial issue is: what kind of judgment is it that
results in our saying, for example, ‘That is a
beautiful sunset’.

Kant argues that such aesthetic judgments

(or ‘judgments of taste’) must have four
key distinguishing features.
First, they are disinterested, meaning that

we take pleasure in something because we
judge it beautiful, rather than judging it
beautiful because we find it pleasurable.

Second and third, such judgments are

both universal and necessary. This means that it is an
intrinsic part of the activity of such a judgment to
expect others to agree with us. Although we may say
‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, that is not how
we act. Instead, we debate and argue about our
aesthetic judgments – and especially about works of
art -and we tend to believe that such debates and
arguments can actually achieve something.

Indeed, for many purposes, ‘beauty’ behaves

as if it were a real property of an object, like
its weight or chemical composition. But
Kant insists that universality and necessity
are in fact a product of features of the human
mind (Kant calls these features ‘common
sense’), and that there is no objective
property of a thing that makes it beautiful.

Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful

objects appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’.
An object’s purpose is the concept according to
which it was made; an object is purposive if it
appears to have such a purpose; if, in other words,
it appears to have been made or designed.
But it is part of the experience of beautiful
objects, Kant argues, that they should affect us as
if they had a purpose, although no particular
purpose can be found.

HEGEL’S AESTHETIC JUDGMENT

1770-1831
Hegel brings art and freedom together and

anticipates the idea of art-for-art’s sake.
For Hegel, the Idea is always opposed to
Nature. The mind is contrasted to the
mindlessness of matter or nature. The
mind creates art, which gives an idea to
nature.
This idea is the unity of the externality or
objectivity of nature and the subjectivity
or personal vision of the artist.

The spectator of the work of art is as

important as the art maker for Hegel.
Beauty in art is the emanation of the
Absolute or Truth through an
object. Beauty can be shown only in a
sensuous form called the Ideal, which
transcends the Idea to become a special
form. Like all of Hegel’s triads, nothing is
lost: nature and idea are the Other to one
another but together they create an
organism, the work of art.

In order to see Beauty, the

detached mind must transcend
nature. By freeing itself, the
mind perceives the spiritual
content of the work of art,
which must also be free in
order to be Beautiful.
Hegel insisted that, to manifest
Beauty, art must expel all that
is external or contiguous or
unnecessary.

For art to reveal Beauty is to reveal Truth,

which can only be pure. This is why art can
never imitate nature, which is, mindless and
irrational. Nature must be reversed with its
antithesis, the idea, which brings about the
inner unity necessary for spiritual content:
nature, idea, spirit = art.

If art must be free, then art should show, not

just Beauty and Truth, but Freedom itself,
which is the property of the free mind. Hegel,
true to his age, is a child of Neoclassicism and,
like many Germans, was looking back to a
Golden Age when human beings were free.
Part of being “modern” is being un-free.

Society has demands, which are placed

upon people who have lost their sense of
wholeness and self-actualization. Hegel
felt that his own age was a diminished
one. Therefore, the artist should take
subject matter from the past, a heroic age
populated by characters that were free of
the social restrictions so prevalent of the
industrial age.

Painting, in its two-dimensional flatness,

is the most suitable manifestation for the
spirit, mind, and personality of the
artist. Painting is appearance, rather than
actuality or matter and, as a mental
process of the artist, is subjective. The
external world is allowed to enter into
the subjective world of art because
concrete reality is transformed through
art.

Beauty must contain ugliness,

just as Truth conceals Lie, and
for reconciliation to take place
beauty and ugliness must be
reconciled into a concrete unity
that is a higher form of Beauty,
which is also Truth.

ARTHUR DANTO’S AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

1924-2013
“In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then
several things were art but each tried to extinguish its
competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there
were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no
special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and,
I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the
end of the story.”

For centuries, the mimetic quality of

art, that is, its representation of nature
and the known visible world, made art
easy to define. The Sistine Chapel, the
dramatic and fantastical renderings of
Poussin or Caravaggio, and even the
ancient idols of the Cyclades all
captured the appearance of reality
surrounding the artist: people, nature,
and human-made objects

According to Danto, however, art can

take on just about any form and be
composed of just about anything and
can occur in just moments for days
and weeks at a time or permanently,
there is tremendous pressure on the
viewer to draw some sort of
interpretation. Each work of art
potentially carries an infinite number
of meanings. And yet all art is art, no
matter the meaning of the individual
piece.

In 1915, Duchamp purchased a snow shovel from

a hardware store and presented it to his New York
patron, Walter Arensberg. On the handle Duchamp
wrote the “title” of the work, “In Advance of the
Broken Arm.” The gesture signaled his disdain for
what he called “retinal art,” art that relies solely
on aesthetic judgments of beauty.

Duchamp’s readymades demanded artists and

critics ask new questions about what art is. No
longer was it sufficient to discuss the merit of a
technique or the proximity to reality. Aesthetics
in art were no longer supreme. Meaning—
embodied meaning—became the grander
question.

“For me, Duchamp’s philosophical discovery was that

art could exist, and that its importance was that it had
no aesthetic distinction to speak of, at a time when it
was widely believed that aesthetic delectation was what
art was all about. That, so far as I was concerned, was
the merit of his readymades.”

The 1964 “Brillo Box” is made of plywood and

is brightly screen printed with the logo and
advertising mark-ups of the Brillo soap pad
company. “Brillo Box” looks like a facsimile of
a commercial Brillo box. One makes a
statement about art and consumerism; one sells
and packages consumer goods.

Danto calls Warhol’s sculpture a “philosophical

Rosetta Stone, since it allowed us to deal with
two languages—the language of art and the
language of reality.”
The question at hand: what makes Warhol’s

“Brillo Box” different from the factory-made
Brillo box? For all intents and purposes, the
cartons were identical.

For Danto, the answer lies in the hidden

properties. Confronted with Warhol’s “Brillo
Box,” we must consider not just aesthetics, but
what art means and how it differs from
commercial uses of similar techniques and
products. That is, we must define not only what
art is, but also what non-art is.

Danto advocates a strong essentialism, meaning that

he thinks that one can arrive at a definition of art that
holds for all instances of art, “irrespective of when
they were made or will be made.” The mistake made
by previous philosophers, he argues, consists of tying
their definitions to something contingent rather than
pegging them to something essential.
Artworks are embodied meanings. As such, they elicit from viewers acts of
interpretation designed to “grasp the intended meaning they embody.”

For Danto, the answer lies in the hidden

properties. Confronted with Warhol’s “Brillo
Box,” we must consider not just aesthetics,
but what art means and how it differs from
commercial uses of similar techniques and
products. That is, we must define not only
what art is, but also what non-art is.

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STORIA E CRITICA DEL DESIGN CONTEMPORANEO

Tutor: Francesca Sorgato

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy

Art might be conceived as a practice in which

3 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

Some major concerns of aesthetics

4 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

1. The aesthetics of nature can be

5 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

2. The theory of criticism can be

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3. And craft can be readily

7 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

One conception of art sees it as specially

8 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

Another conception of art of long standing

9 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

A third conception of art sees it as tied

This conception of art has very deep

10 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

Other important conceptions of art regard it

11 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

Some more recent conceptions of art view it

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THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Among the marks that have been proposed as

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We have a general idea of what a work of art is:

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In ancient Greece there were works

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The activity of producing “works” (now we

16 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

We have to bear in mind that art was above all

17 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

According to Plato, each object of the material world is a

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A work of art is an imitation of reality. The artist

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According to Plato, art is false knowledge

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Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) has no ontological

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“It is clear that the general origin of

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“And it is also natural for all to delight in

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We take delight or pleasure in watching an

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In both cases we know 1) that it is an

27 24/05/2024 Milano privileged & confidential

We know that we are experiencing

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In his Poetics Aristotle offers a

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Catharsis is a metaphor used by Aristotle to