the Aesthetic..... Art....

I am placing this here because one of the traditional area’s of
philosophy is the Aesthetic…and so under that base, I
am going to explore the Aesthetic, our understanding of ART…

I begin with a common definition of ART…

“In the basic aesthetic approach to art, art objects are implicitly
understood as meaningful expressions of artists lives that are capable of
eliciting particularly intense or meaningful experiences in viewing subjects”

so, to turn this into English…the ARTIST, from the experiences of their life,
turn those experiences into ART… the viewer of that ART tries to deduce from
the ART, what experiences the ARTIST is suggesting… assuming I have that right,

I would in fact, again assuming I am right about what ART is, I disagree with
what ART is…I don’t think ART is in the ART work or in the understanding
of the experiences of the ARTIST…

I don’t actually think ART lies in ART… ART is really within us…we see
an ARTWORK and our response to the ARTWORK is the ART, not the
ARTWORK itself…we see the ARTWORK, be it a painting or a building
or sculpture… that ARTWORK triggers something within us…
that trigger is the ART… how we see the ART is the ART…

Let us say, for example, I am now looking at my bookcases… full of
books… are those book cases ART? my response is what decides if
the bookcases is ART or not…I do consider my bookcases as ART because
they hold books… I consider books to be ART… books physically look
like ART to me…now to you, they may not look like ART…

but how do we decide what is ART and what isn’t?

is it the ARTWORK or, or is it our response to the ARTWORK?

AS we are raised to hold certain “mental contraptions” or what I like
to call indoctrinations, bias, superstitions, habits, assumptions…

I hold that these “mental contraptions” are what create our understanding
of what ART is…my situation as a white middle age man who is middle class,
in part, in part, helps determine what I hold to be ART and what is beautiful…

it is in the choices we make that is the ART…I can choose to follow
the enlightenment agenda and be rational, logical, lucid, sensible…
and that choice is ART or I can choose to follow the Romantic era
and I can choose to be whimsical or colorful or embrace emotions,
feelings, sentiment…again, that choice is ART…

ART lies in the choices we make…

so the question of ART lies in the choices we make about what we see,
hear, feel, touch, smell or taste…I can hear a child banging pots
and I can decide if that is ART or if that is simply a child banging on pots…

so to clearly understand it… ART doesn’t lie outside of us, there is
no object/ subject dichotomy in what we think as ART…there is only
our understanding or judgements or choices we make about something
that then turns what we see, hear, feel, smell or taste into ART…

ART isn’t ART until we make a choice or judgement about it…

Kropotkin