Subject: RE: The Aesthetic [was RE: Daumier-Smith and Empathy]
From: Sean Draine (seandr@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 21:28:40 GMT
Cecilia:
"Art is beauty. But what, then, is beauty? Joyce works on a definition
that fairly boggles the mind. Keats asserts that "Beauty is truth," so
what might follow is that if you accept Joyce's view that art is
beautiful, then art is truth. So what is true is art."
Very interesting, but this last bit kind of has the feel of a dog
chasing it's tail. The most helpful definitions of art I've come across
cast it as a social phenomenon, the same general species as, say,
government or religion or teenage boys wearing really really big pants.
Tom Wolfe's _The Painted Word_ is an good example of this more
contemporary critical approach.
Social phenomenon are inherent complicated and soft around the edges, so
this doesn't give you a clear way to determine whether or not a given
artifact is a work of art.
-Sean
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