Can an object of art lack aesthetic properties?

Conceptual Art “is not meant to be looked at aesthetically, but to be thought about intellectually.” — Phaidon’s The Art Museum

Thinking intellectually about a conceptual artwork can still involve aesthetic considerations, whether positive or negative. E.g. some minimalist configurations intended as conceptual pieces can be considered elegantly or inelegantly presented, and these are aesthetic properties. However, there may be borderline cases. Does a conceptual piece consisting simply of a card on a gallery wall and bearing only a title and an artist’s name have aesthetic properties? Arguably, any aesthetic properties would lie entirely in the ideas evoked rather than the object on the wall; so the aesthetic properties would be like those of literature rather than visual art. Alternatively, some would demur from regarding the card as an art object at all. Aesthetic notions flounder when stretched too far beyond their comfort zone; borderline cases, unfortunately, don't betoken unequivocal borders.

Can an art object fail to elicit an aesthetic response? Yes, but not because it lacks the potential to do so.

An aesthetic response is an emotional response evoked directly through the senses. The intellect does not intervene. One can experience the beauty, ugliness, balance, dynamic, etc. in something without consciously thinking about what one is perceiving and why. Anything perceptible, by definition, has the potential to evoke an aesthetic response. Aesthetic responses can be described and analysed to determine what principles they appear to follow. However, these principles do not belong to the object as its aesthetic; an aesthetic is not a property in that sense.

It is a matter of convention in the discourse on art to associate an aesthetic with an object or group of objects, but such associations depend on value judgments that differ from place to place and from one time to another. Perhaps an aesthetic is best thought of as a discursive object rather than as an objective property. Hence aesthetics, as a philosophical discipline, involves critical reflection on art, and on beauty, ugliness … etc. in general (there is beauty in mathematics and in nature), and aesthetics involves accounting for the perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments.

I find the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a useful first reference point for this kind of question.

In the Theodore Adorno's Aesthetic first chapter we can read: "It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore". Then if you think that an object is art perhaps it is not and viceverse.

No is my short answer.

Some object can be created, but if it is not seen by someone...nobody will know its artistic value.

And if somebody does see it, we know that artistic appreciation is different in different people.

If you can decrease the number of people evaluating the artistic creation you can increase the chance of finding a no/low artistic appreciation.

Realistically, that can only work if you expose the object one or a few persons who you may know to have no interest in art or are mentally challenged.

In a large cohort random or blind selection of people you will definitely find people with artistic opinions.

Of course not. The main object of aesthetics is art. A person aesthetically analyzes what affects all his feelings. But the criteria for accepting works of art from each period will be different, because the taste of today's youth is very different from the taste of young people 50 years ago.

This question has also intrigued classical thinkers.

Нет, этого невозможно.

Does this botched restoration have positive aesthetic properties?

I think we should scrap the word aesthetic. It is far too ambiguous to be useful.

Derek Allan I disagree. It marks off a useful branch of value theory, distinct from moral/ethical value, pragmatic value, and epistemic value. Ambiguity is rampant (and not just in value theory). You might as well scrap the word "good" which is used in all those areas of value theory. (Yes, I also realize "value theory" is itself ambiguous.)

So what precisely does "aesthetic" mean in your view, Karl? How would you define it?

I don't think a nontrivial definition (necessary & sufficient conditions) is on the cards. I regard "aesthetic" (and related terms such as "art") as terms involving open-ended family-resemblance concepts. However, their truck with matters of taste would be a paradigmatic feature. Also, one must be careful to distinguish descriptive from prescriptive uses of the terms.

Thanks Karl. The OED, as I recall, defines aesthetic as having three meanings: relating to beauty, relating to art, and relating to sensuous objects (I can't recall the exact wording for this last one - it is the one that comes via Baumgarten, I assume.)

Now, these three meanings, if we take them seriously, are quite distinct and different. Something can be beautiful without being art and can be art without being sensuous. In my experience, philosophers of art make little or no attempt to deal with this problem. They either ignore it completely and proceed merrily to use the word "aesthetic" (and its derivatives) without further ado - which of course vitiates all subsequent discussion. Or they pay lip service to the issue but then ignore it anyway.

I was once at an ASA conference and got so tired of hearing speakers bandy the word "aesthetic" about without any attempt to specify what they meant by it (I'm sure this still happens on a regular basis - and these are philosophers!) that I spoke up and proposed a ten year ban on the use of the word, explaining why. Oddly enough - and to my considerable surprise - there were several murmurs of agreement.

Well there you go. You say "Something can be beautiful without being art and can be art without being sensuous. In my experience, philosophers of art make little or no attempt to deal with this problem." I agree but I don't regard it as a problem. I'm happy to allow landscapes, selected or "found" objects, gourmet foods, wines, mathematical proofs, scientific theories, to have aesthetic properties. Also, I regard ugliness and disgustingness, as aesthetic properties (negative, of course). It's all a matter of taste (pun intended).

Hi Karl. In this context, it's not really a question of what you individually are happy to "allow" aesthetic to mean. If we went down that road, presumably the word could mean what anyone said it meant, and all academic discussion about its meaning would become useless. (Incidentally, I read an article recently by an "analytic" philosopher of art who claimed that "beautiful" as used by Kant also meant "ugly". Same kind of problem. Time to put away pens and pencils and go home.)

Well, my ‘model’ for a characterization (i.e. not a strict definition) of the aesthetic would be Wittgenstein’s characterization of ‘games’. That would allow for several distinct paradigms (which may or may not each be definable in the strict sense) linked by family resemblances. I see the category of the aesthetic primarily in contrast to such categories as the moral, the epistemic, and the pragmatic. If those categories are not problematic, then an acceptable negative characterization might be possible. There are of course areas of intersection. Vagueness and borderline cases will also have to be acknowledged.

Hi Karl

I think W's language games thesis is under a large philosophical cloud these days. Frankly, I was never convinced by it. There is an obvious unanswerable question: where and why do the "games" stop? Where, in other words, is the outer limit?

Moreover, it leaves the philosophy of art in a hopeless situation. Pick up almost any book on the subject and you'll find the word "aesthetic" used in key parts of the argument. If the meaning of the word wafts about in a cloud of so-called "language games", any argument will self-destruct instantly.

Interestingly, that's very often the case whether or not W and his games are invoked. The term aesthetic is frequently employed in key arguments but never defined (except, on odd occasions, in vague ways). Personally, when I encounter that in a book on philosophy of art - it usually occurs in an early chapter - I just put the book down and consign it to the useless category.

"When I hear the word 'aesthetic' ..., I release the safety on my Browning!" -- (almost Hanns Johst) 😂👌😉

Well, so do I actually, for the very reason I've been explaining - it is a "trap word", because it is inherently ambiguous, but - and this is the important point - it is treated so often in the philosophy of art (aka aesthetics) as if its meaning were self-evidently clear.

So, phrases such as the following are endlessly trotted out as if their meaning is clear: aesthetic properties, aesthetic response, aesthetic aims/objectives, aesthetic achievement, and so on and on. They are not remotely clear and one has only to check the OED or some other quality dictionary to understand why. In everyday speech it doesn't matter much ("he has no aesthetic sense") but in the philosophy of art it is a major and elementary blunder (unfortunately committed again and again...)

J.L. Austin on the vicissitudes of language: "Fact is richer than diction."

Hi Karl

Not really sure that I follow...

DA

Derek Allan Isn't your complaint that the term "aesthetic" has become vague(r), more ambiguous, and ∴ useless? An Austinian point might be that those who use the term are overreaching in an attempt to encompass (rich) phenomena that it was not designed for.

Hi Karl,

No, that wasn’t my point. I was speaking specifically about academic usage of the word aesthetic. It has three quite distinct meanings (which I listed), partly as a result of its history. Academics (e.g. in professional journals and conferences papers) have an unfortunate tendency to ignore this, thereby gravely weakening their arguments, since one never knows which meaning/s is/are in play. This is just one of the reasons why, in my view, modern aesthetics never makes any progress: issues are always blurred by a loose usage of key terms such as aesthetic.

I also made the point that in colloquial speech the word aesthetic is often used very loosely, meaning little more than “attractive” or something of the sort. That doesn’t matter much in my view. One can’t expect everyone to be philosophising all the time.

Derek Allan I guess much in a similar vein could be said about the word "art". This paper might interest you:

Hi Karl. Thank you. I will have a read. (From a brief glance at one page, I am not likely to be a sympathetic reader...)

Hi Karl, I’ve read through this article – or I should say “skimmed through” because so-called “analytic” aesthetics (of which this is an example) bores me senseless. The writers beg all sorts of questions, make loose assumptions galore, and provide, I think, just one example of a work of art, although works of art are ostensibly the topic under discussion. (I’m fascinated, by the way, by their concept of “conventional art”. Fascinated but not in a good way…)

I long ago decided that analytic aesthetics is probably worse than useless: it is a modern-day version of the worst kind of medieval scholastic philosophy. If the general purpose of aesthetics and the philosophy of art today is to interest students in art and give them a deeper understanding of it (and what else can it be?) analytic aesthetics is an abject failure, kept alive solely by the indulgence of certain universities.

I was going to give you a comment on each paragraph, but the irritating pointlessness of the exercise repelled me. Why dignify this kind of stuff by comments?

Thank you for giving me the link all the same. It’s interesting to see how little this brand of aesthetics has progressed over the years, how it is still regurgitating the same old stuff, how unadventurous it still is in its thinking, and how trapped it remains in its little “analytic” box.

Hi Lalihon

Re: "... because the taste of today's youth is very different from the taste of young people 50 years ago."

How do you account for the fact that some works of art last for hundreds of years - e.g. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart (just confining myself to 'Western' artists)?