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Aesthetics (also spelled esthetics) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and taste, which in a broad sense incorporates the philosophy of art.Slater, B. H., Aesthetics, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, , accessed on 15 September 2024. Aesthetics examines values about, and critical judgments of, artistic taste and preference.Zangwill, Nick. " Aesthetic Judgment ", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 02-28-2003/10-22-2007. Retrieved 07-24-2008. It thus studies how imagine, create, and perform works of art, as well as how people use, enjoy, and criticize art. Aesthetics considers why people consider certain things beautiful and not others, as well as how objects of beauty and art can affect our moods and our beliefs.Thomas Munro, "Aesthetics", The World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, ed. A. Richard Harmet, et al., (Chicago, Illinois: Merchandise Mart Plaza, 1986), p. 80.
Aesthetics tries to find answers to what exactly is art and what makes good art. It considers what happens in our minds when we view Visual arts, listen to music, read poetry, enjoy delicious food, and engage in large artistic projects like creating and experiencing plays, fashion shows, films, and television programs. It can also focus on how humans regard various forms of beauty in the natural world. Its function is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature".Kelly (1998), p. ix.
Aesthetics is closely related to the philosophy of art and the two terms are often used interchangeably since both involve the philosophical study of aesthetic phenomena. One difference is that the philosophy of art focuses on art, whereas the scope of aesthetics also includes other domains, such as beauty in nature and everyday life. This leads some theorists to argue that the philosophy of art is a subfield of aesthetics. However, the precise relation between the two fields is disputed and another characterization holds that the philosophy of art is the broader discipline. This view argues that aesthetics mainly addresses aesthetic properties, while the philosophy of art also investigates non-aesthetic features of artworks, belonging to fields such as ontology, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics.
Even though the philosophical study of aesthetic problems originated in Ancient period, it was not until the 18th century that aesthetics emerged as a distinct branch of philosophy when philosophers engaged in systematic inquiry into its principles. The term "aesthetics" was coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, initially defined as the study of sensibility or sensations of beautiful objects. The term comes from the ancient Greek words aisthetikos, meaning , aisthesthai, meaning , and aesthesis, meaning . The earliest known use in the English language happened in a translation by W. Hooper in the 1770s.
Aristotle states that mimesis is a natural instinct of humanity that separates humans from animals and that all human artistry "follows the pattern of nature". Because of this, Aristotle believed that each of the mimetic arts possesses what Stephen Halliwell calls "highly structured procedures for the achievement of their purposes." For example, music imitates with the media of rhythm and harmony, whereas dance imitates with rhythm alone, and poetry with language.
The forms also differ in their object of imitation. Comedy, for instance, is a dramatic imitation of men worse than average; whereas tragedy imitates men slightly better than average. Lastly, the forms differ in their manner of imitation – through narrative or character, through change or no change, and through drama or no drama.
The precise distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic properties is disputed. According to one proposal, aesthetic properties require a specific aesthetic sensitivity in addition to the sensory perception of non-aesthetic properties, going beyond simple colors, shapes, and sounds. Aesthetic properties are associated with evaluations, but not all are intrinsically good or bad. For example, being a realistic representation may be aesthetically good in some artistic contexts and bad in others.
The school of realism argues that aesthetic properties are objective, mind-independent features of reality. A related proposal asserts that they are emergent properties dependent on non-aesthetic properties. According to this view, the beauty of a painting may emerge from the right combination of colors and shapes. A different position holds that aesthetic properties are response-dependent, for example, that features of objects only qualify as aesthetic properties if they evoke aesthetic experiences in observers. The terms "aesthetic property" and "aesthetic quality" are often used interchangeably to refer to aspects such as beauty, sublimity, and grandeur. However, some philosophers distinguish the two, associating aesthetic properties with objective features and aesthetic qualities with subjective experiences and emotional responses.
An aesthetic object is an object with aesthetic properties. One interpretation suggests that aesthetic objects are Material object that evoke aesthetic experiences. According to this view, if a person admires an oil painting then the physical canvas and paint make up the aesthetic object. Another interpretation, associated with the school of phenomenology, argues that aesthetic objects are not material but intentional objects. Intentional objects are part of the content of experiences and their existence depends on the perceiver. An intentional object may accurately reflect a material object, as in the case of veridical perceptions, but can also fail to do so, which happens during perceptual . The phenomenological perspective focuses on the intentional object given in experience rather than the material object considered independently of the perceiver.
The aesthetic value of beauty is often singled out as a central topic of aesthetics. It is a key aspect of human experience, influencing both personal decisions and cultural developments. Examples of beautiful objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans, and artworks. As a positive value, beauty contrasts with ugliness as its negative counterpart. Beauty is typically understood as a quality of objects that involves balance or harmony and evokes admiration or pleasure when perceived, but its precise definition is debated.
Various theoretical disputes surround the nature of beauty and its role in aesthetics. Some theories understand beauty as an objective feature of external objects. Others emphasize its subjective nature, linking it to personal experience and perception. They argue that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" rather than in the perceived object. Another central debate concerns the features that all beautiful objects have in common. The classical conception of beauty is rooted in classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. Focusing on objective features, it asserts that beauty is an harmonious arrangement of parts into a coherent whole. Aesthetic hedonism, by contrast, is a subjective theory holding that a thing is beautiful if it acts as a source of aesthetic pleasure. Other conceptions define beautiful objects in terms of intrinsic value, the manifestation of ideal forms, or as what evokes love and passion.
Diverse features are associated with aesthetic experiences, but it is controversial whether any of them are essential. Aesthetic experiences usually appreciate an object for its own sake because of its sensory properties, resulting in aesthetic pleasure from a positive evaluation of the object. This pleasure is typically said to be detached from practical concerns and can involve selfless absorption, allowing imaginative freedom or free play of Mind in addition to sensory perception. Some theorists associate this free play with an absence of conceptual activity. Aesthetic experiences may also be Normativity, meaning that certain responses are appropriate, like the positive appreciation of beauty, but others are not, such as the positive appreciation of ugliness.
A central aspect of aesthetic experience is the aesthetic attitudea special way of observing or engaging with art and nature. This attitude involves a form of pure appreciation of perceptual qualities detached from personal desires and practical concerns. It is disinterested in this sense by engaging with an object for its own sake without ulterior motives or practical consequences. For example, the experience of a violent storm through the aesthetic attitude may focus on its intricate patterns of lightning and thunder rather than preparing for its immediate dangers. One characterization understands the aesthetic attitude as a natural form of apprehension that occurs on its own in certain situations. Another outlook holds that the aesthetic attitude is a Voluntary action stance people can choose to adopt towards any object. There is debate about the extent and type of emotional engagement a disinterested stance requires, for instance, whether fear during a horror movie can be disinterested.
The aesthetic attitude is sometimes contrasted with other attitudes, such as the practical attitude, which is interested in usefulness and seeks to utilize or manipulate objects to achieve specific goals. Similarly, it differs from the scientific attitude, which aims to explain phenomena and acquire factual knowledge about the world. Some philosophers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger, suggest that the aesthetic attitude can reveal aspects of reality obscured in other attitudes.
Aesthetic experience is further associated with aesthetic pleasurea form of enjoyment in response to natural and artistic beauty. It is typically characterized as disinterested pleasure. It contrasts with interested pleasure that arises from the satisfaction of desires, such as the joy of achieving a personal goal or indulging in Food craving. Another difference is that aesthetic pleasure does not depend on the existence of the enjoyed object, like enjoying the beauty of a sunset in a dream. The joy in achieving a personal goal, by contrast, would be frustrated if one discovered that the achievement was merely a dream. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant argue that aesthetic pleasure is pre-conceptual, meaning that it arises from a free interplay between imagination and understanding rather than from cognitive judgments or conceptual analysis. Some theorists distinguish refined from unrefined aesthetic pleasures based on whether the pleasure is evoked by a cultivated taste or an immediate, instinctual response.
Aesthetic pleasure is central to the characterization of various aesthetic phenomena, which are said to involve or evoke such pleasure. However, the view that aesthetic pleasure is the defining characteristic of the entire aesthetic domain is controversial. It faces challenges in explaining phenomena such as the sublime, drama, tragedy, and various forms of modern art, which may evoke diverse emotions not primarily linked to pleasure.
Philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume argue that there are general aesthetic principles or universal criteria that are applied when making aesthetic judgments. Particularists, by contrast, assert that the unique nature of each aesthetic object requires a case-by-case evaluation that cannot be fully subsumed under general principles. A related debate between rationalism and the immediacy thesis concerns whether aesthetic judgments are mediated through concept application and reasoning or emerge directly from sensory intuition.
Aesthetic judgments rely on Aesthetic taste, which is a sensitivity to aesthetic qualities, a capacity to feel aesthetic pleasure, or an ability to discern beauty and other aesthetic qualities. Taste is a type of preference expressed in immediate reactions and is sometimes understood as an inner sense or cognitive faculty. Differences in taste are often used to explain why people disagree about aesthetic judgments and why the judgments of some people, such as art critics with extensive experience and a refined sense, carry more weight than those of casual observers. Taste varies both between cultures and between individuals within a culture. However, there are also some cross-cultural agreements. Various philosophers argue that taste can be learned to some extent and that the judgments of experienced observers follow similar standards, suggesting the existence of social norms of right and wrong aesthetic assessments.
The term "aesthetic universal" refers to aspects of taste and other aesthetic phenomena that are shared across different cultures and societies, indicating common features of human nature underlying aesthetics. Suggested general tendencies include the dispositions to engage in artistic expressions or to derive aesthetic pleasure from appreciating these expressions. The existence of more specific shared tendencies is debated. An example is the idea that humans generally find Savanna with open grassy plains and scattered trees pleasing.
Essentialist approaches argue that there is an essence or a set of inherent features shared by all artworks and only by them. They often define artworks in terms of other aesthetic concepts, such as representation, beauty, or aesthetic experience. An early object-centered approach, first proposed by Plato, characterizes artworks as representations that seek to reflect or Mimesis certain aspects of reality. Another definition suggests that artworks are objects designed to evoke aesthetic experiences or pleasure. A related approach proposes that all artworks have certain aesthetic properties in common, such as beauty. Aesthetic formalism argues that specific formal features, such as a "significant form", are the hallmark of art. Artist-centered approaches see artistic activity as the essential aspect of artworks. One conception understands artworks as special vehicles through which artists express emotions and other mental states.
Conventionalism definitions view art as a socially constructed category. This means that it does not primarily depend on the inherent properties of objects, for example, what they represent or what forms they have. Instead, art is defined by social and cultural agreements, which are subject to change. A key motivation for this approach has been the emergence of modern art, which has challenged many earlier conceptions. Conventionalist definitions can explain, for instance, that even mundane Found object like a urinal are considered art if conventions say so. Institutional theories argue that the conventions are set by social institutions of the art world. Because of this social dependence, an object considered art in one society may not be art in another society. Historical theories, another form of conventionalism, assert that the category of art depends on established traditions and historical contexts. They claim that an object becomes part of this category if it stands in the right relation to these traditions, for example, by being created in an artistic context and resembling other recognized artworks.
There are also hybrid theories that combine elements from other theories. For instance, one approach holds that an object is an artwork if it either meets certain aesthetic standards or is conventionally regarded as art. The diversity of proposed definitions and the difficulties in reconciling them have led some philosophers to argue against the existence of precise criteria. Some conclude that a definition is strictly impossible. Others provide vague characterizations, suggesting that the domain of art is characterized by overlapping similarities, known as family resemblance.
A similar discussion addresses whether artworks are material objects, which exist independent of observers, or intentional objects, which exist in the experience of observers. Pluralists argue that different types of artworks belong to distinct ontological categories. Contextualists accept this view and further propose that the ontological category depends on the context of discussion. Deflationism is skeptical about the fundamental existence of artworks in any form. It acknowledges that the term art may be practically useful in everyday language but rejects that it refers to any fundamental entities of reality.
Artworks are categorized in various ways. Some distinctions focus on the Artistic medium used to express artistic ideas. For example, paintings typically use paint, such as Oil paint or acryl paint, which is distributed on a surface, whereas dance involves bodily movements. Similarly, music is performed using instruments and voice to produce sounds, and literature relies on language. Hybrid forms like opera and film combine several of these elements. Another distinction is between performance works and object works. Performance works, like a song performed on stage, are dynamically enacted in time, whereas object works, like a painting, have a more static nature. Artworks can also be classified by style, such as impressionism and surrealism, and by their intended purpose, like political and religious art.
Expression is the conveyance of psychological states, such as emotions, moods, and attitudes. For example, a painter may depict a barren landscape in muted colors to express sadness, while a musician might use a fast tempo and upbeat melody to convey excitement. The expressed mental states often align with the artist's personal experience. However, this is not necessarily the case and artists may explore psychological states they observed in others or entirely fictional experiences. An artwork can express a mental state like sadness by evoking it in the experience of the audience. Alternatively, the expression can also happen if observers recognize the presence of sadness in the artwork even if they do not personally feel it. Expression theories consider expression a core feature of artworks. They characterize artworks as expressions of the artist's mind, focusing on creativity and originality in the manifestation of aesthetic experiences.
The terms interpretation and art criticism are sometimes used interchangeably, but criticism is typically associated with more components. In addition to interpretation, it provides an initial description of an artwork's general features to enable readers to form a mental image of the most important aspects. Criticism also classifies artworks through categories like style and genre, relates them to art-historical traditions, and evaluates their positive and negative qualities.
Critics sometimes propose conflicting interpretations of the same artwork. According to critical monism, there is only one comprehensive correct interpretation, implying that conflicting interpretations cannot both be correct. Critical pluralism, by contrast, asserts that there can be different but equally valid interpretations and that it is not always possible to determine which of two conflicting interpretations is superior. A similar issue involves whether interpretations can be true or false in an objective sense.
Various frameworks of interpretation have been proposed. According to intentionalism, the meaning of an artwork is determined by the author's intenttheir reasons and motives that led to the creation of the artwork. This typically involves analyzing the ideas the artist aimed to express but can also include a biographical analysis to learn about psychological and social circumstances in the artist's life.
Intentionalism is a controversial theory, termed intentional fallacy by its critics. Some objections point to cases where the author's intention cannot be known, where the author themselves cannot be identified, or where no traditional author exists, as artworks created by artificial intelligence. In these cases, meaning would be inaccessible or non-existent. Other objections assert that an artist may fail to accurately express their intention or may manifest unintended aesthetic features, suggesting that an artwork can contain both less and more than the artist intended.
An alternative to intentionalism argues that meaning is determined by artistic, stylistic, linguistic, and other cultural conventions. For example, linguistic conventions determine the literal meanings of words and thereby influence the overall meaning of a poem. Another framework holds that meaning is shaped by how the audience, rather than the author, interprets or would interprets the intention underlying the work. Artistic formalism proposes a different approach by focusing interpretation exclusively on formal or perceptual features of artworks.
Aestheticism and instrumentalism are theories about the value of art. Aestheticism asserts that the primary value of art lies in its intrinsic aesthetic merits, independent of any external purposes. This idea of the autonomy of art is expressed in the slogan "art for art's sake". Strong forms of aestheticism not only disregard external purposes but see them as detrimental influences that undermine artistic integrity. Instrumentalism, by contrast, explains the value of art by the effects it has on other domains. It understands art as a means to things such as moral education, spiritual growth, therapeutic benefits, and social cohesion.
Painting is a visual art in which a painter applies colors to a surface. It allows for a diverse range of motives and styles, and is often considered a paradigm form of art. The representation of real entities plays a central role in many forms of painting, ranging from landscapes and people to historic events. This process involves artistic choices that go beyond simple replication, such as guiding the viewer's attention to specific aspects or highlighting important but easily overlooked features. The issue of representation is also crucial in photography, a visual art shaped by technological developments in camera design and Image editing processes. A key topic in the philosophy of photography concerns its mechanical manner of authentically representing real objects, frequently drawing parallels and distinctions with painting. The status of photographs as true artworks is disputed, with critics arguing that the mechanical nature of capturing images lacks the necessary artistic creativity.
Music is a performance art in which sounds are combined to create aesthetic patterns, relying on aspects such as melody and rhythm. Unlike painting and photography, music is typically less associated with objective representation, having a closer link to the expression of emotions. A key discussion in the philosophy of music revolves around the definition of music or the criteria under which a combination of sounds is music. Proposals range from objective criteria, such as the organization of sounds, to subjective criteria, like the way sounds are interpreted or experienced. Dance is another performance art in which dancers perform a series of bodily movements, often following a choreography. It is typically accompanied by music and shares with music an emphasis on expressive features.
Architecture is the art or craft of designing and building, encompassing a wide range of structures from monuments and cathedrals to skyscrapers and residential homes. It typically combines aesthetic with functional goals, seeking to create buildings that are both visually appealing and practically useful. This dual nature is a central topic of the philosophy of architecture, with one theory suggesting that mere buildings can be distinguished from artistic architecture by the presence of decorative elements. Sculpture is another art form that, like architecture, involves the creation of three-dimensional works. Sculptures are usually static objects made of robust materials like stone, metal, and wood. However, the field of sculpture is broader and covers diverse three-dimensional objects, including Kinetic art. Key discussions in the philosophy of sculpture address the definition, representational aspects, and aesthetic features of sculptures as well as the influence of the chosen material.
Literature has language as its primary medium. In its widest sense, literature encompasses any written document. However, the term is typically used in a more narrow sense in aesthetics for forms of writing that belong to the , such as poems, novels, and drama. Literature as an art is often characterized by its deliberate, elaborate, and organized use of language, but there is no universally accepted demarcation between artistic literature and other forms of writing. Poetry is a distinct form of literature often written in verses composed of several lines that may follow specific patterns, such as meter and rhyme. Many poems are characterized by a deliberate economical use of language that seeks to evoke specific experiences while being difficult to paraphrase.
Theater is a performance art that combines elements from other art forms. It typically includes a carefully prepared set or stage where actors perform, usually incorporating storytelling and sound design to create immersive experiences. Theater is normally performed before a live audience, which can create a sense of immediacy that is less prevalent in related art forms, such as film. Film also integrates aspects from various artistic disciplines but relies more heavily on technological means of recording and editing. Films can involve actors but may also include animated film characters or documentary real-life events. They are normally the result of a collaborative efforts of many people, which complicates the identification of a singular author in the traditional sense.
Video games are a more recent form of art. Like theater and film, they usually blend visual, auditory, and narrative elements. They typically stand out through their emphasis on player interaction, allowing active exploration of and engagement with the game world. The status of films and video games as serious forms of art is disputed. Proponents tend to emphasize their aesthetic qualities, while critics often point to their association with mass production and popular culture as counterarguments. For video games, a related debate centers on the elements of competition and winning, questioning whether these elements run counter to the spirit of art.
Various attempts have been made to define Post-Modern Aesthetics. The challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo.
Benedetto Croce suggested that "expression" is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central. George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities. Marshall McLuhan suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed to make visible what is usually invisible about a society. Theodor Adorno felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic experience. Hal Foster attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty, κάλλος kallos). André Malraux explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of art.Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure, André Malraux's Theory of Art (Amsterdam: Netherlands Rodopi, 2009). Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.Massumi, Brian (ed.), A Shock to Thought. Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. London, England & New York, New York: Routeledge, 2002. . Walter Benjamin echoed Malraux in believing aesthetics was a comparatively recent invention, a view proven wrong in the late 1970s, when Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and information theory. Denis Dutton in "The Art Instinct" also proposed that an aesthetic sense was a vital evolutionary factor.
Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between taste and the sublime. Sublime painting, unlike kitsch realism, "... will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, What is Postmodernism?, in The Postmodern Condition, Minnesota and Manchester, 1984.Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, "Scriptures: Diffracted Traces", in Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.
Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.Freud, Sigmund, "The Uncanny" (1919). Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work of Sigmund Freud, 17: 234–236. London, England: The Hogarth Press. Following Freud and Merleau-Ponty,Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1964), The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press. . Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing.Lacan, Jacques, "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" ( The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII), New York, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.
The relation of Marxist aesthetics to post-modern aesthetics is still a contentious area of debate.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Max Bense, Abraham Moles and Frieder Nake were among the first to analyze links between aesthetics, information processing, and information theory.A. Moles: Théorie de l'information et perception esthétique, Paris, Denoël, 1973 (Information Theory and aesthetical perception).F. Nake (1974). Ästhetik als Informationsverarbeitung. ( Aesthetics as information processing). Grundlagen und Anwendungen der Informatik im Bereich ästhetischer Produktion und Kritik. Springer, 1974, . Max Bense, for example, built on Birkhoff's aesthetic measure and proposed a similar information theoretic measure , where is the redundancy and the entropy, which assigns higher value to simpler artworks.
In the 1990s, Jürgen Schmidhuber described an theory of beauty. This theory takes the subjectivity of the observer into account and postulates that among several observations classified as comparable by a given subjective observer, the most aesthetically pleasing is the one that is encoded by the shortest description, following the direction of previous approaches. Schmidhuber's theory explicitly distinguishes between that which is Beauty and that which is interesting, stating that interestingness corresponds to the first derivative of subjectively perceived beauty. He supposes that every observer continually tries to improve the predictability and compressibility of their observations by identifying regularities like repetition, symmetries, and fractal self-similarity.Jürgen Schmidhuber. Papers on artificial curiosity since 1990: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/interest.html, .
Since about 2005, computer scientists have attempted to develop automated methods to infer aesthetic quality of images. Typically, these approaches follow a machine learning approach, where large numbers of manually rated photographs are used to "teach" a computer about what visual properties are of relevance to aesthetic quality. A study by Y. Li and C. J. Hu employed Birkhoff's measurement in their statistical learning approach where order and complexity of an image determined aesthetic value. (2025). 9783642122415, Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9783642122415 The image complexity was computed using information theory while the order was determined using fractal compression. There is also the case of the Acquine engine, developed at Penn State University, that rates natural photographs uploaded by users.
There have also been relatively successful attempts with regard to music.Manaris, B., Roos, P., Penousal, M., Krehbiel, D., Pellicoro, L. and Romero, J.; A Corpus-Based Hybrid Approach to Music Analysis and Composition; Proceedings of 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07); Vancouver, British Columbia; pp. 839–845. 2007. Computational approaches have also been attempted in film making as demonstrated by a software model developed by Chitra Dorai and a group of researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. The tool predicted aesthetics based on the values of narrative elements. A relation between Max Bense's mathematical formulation of aesthetics in terms of "redundancy" and "complexity" and theories of musical anticipation was offered using the notion of Information Rate.Dubnov, S.; Musical Information Dynamics as Models of Auditory Anticipation; in Machine Audition: Principles, Algorithms and Systems, Ed. W. Weng, IGI Global publication, 2010.
British philosopher and theorist of conceptual art aesthetics, Peter Osborne, makes the point that "'post-conceptual art' aesthetic does not concern a particular type of contemporary art so much as the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general ...".Peter Osborne, Anywhere Or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso Books, London, England, 2013. pp. 3 & 51. Osborne noted that contemporary art is 'post-conceptual' in a public lecture delivered in 2010.
Gary Tedman has put forward a theory of a subjectless aesthetics derived from Karl Marx's concept of alienation, and Louis Althusser's antihumanism, using elements of Freud's group psychology, defining a concept of the 'aesthetic level of practice'.Tedman, G. (2012), Aesthetics & Alienation, Zero Books.
Gregory Loewen has suggested that the subject is key in the interaction with the aesthetic object. The work of art serves as a vehicle for the projection of the individual's identity into the world of objects, as well as being the irruptive source of much of what is uncanny in modern life. As well, art is used to memorialize individuated biographies in a manner that allows persons to imagine that they are part of something greater than themselves.Gregory Loewen, Aesthetic Subjectivity, 2011, pp. 36–37, 157, 238.
Pierre Bourdieu disagrees with Kant's idea of the "aesthetic". He argues that Kant's "aesthetic" merely represents an experience that is the product of an elevated class habitus and scholarly leisure as opposed to other possible and equally valid "aesthetic" experiences which lay outside Kant's narrow definition.Pierre Bourdieu, "Postscript", in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London, England: Routledge, 1984), pp. 485–500. ; and David Harris, "Leisure and Higher Education", in Tony Blackshaw, ed., Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies (London, England: Routledge, 2013), p. 403. and books.google.com/books?id=gc2_zubEovgC&pg=PT403.
Timothy Laurie argues that theories of musical aesthetics "framed entirely in terms of appreciation, contemplation or reflection risk idealizing an implausibly unmotivated listener defined solely through musical objects, rather than seeing them as a person for whom complex intentions and motivations produce variable attractions to cultural objects and practices".
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