What is Artistic Beauty essays

What is Artistic Beauty essays Dr. Marck L. Beggs, Director M.L.A. Program What is Artistic Beauty? From the beginning of time, men and women have scrutinized, categorized, and compared components of their surroundings in an attempt to better understand their world. In the Bibles Genesis account, Adam, seemingly in appreciation of Eves uniqueness and beauty, poetically proclaims her, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.[Gen. 2:23 NIV] Much later, artists, writers, and philosophers have sought to understand beauty, balance, and perfection the sublime. Their struggle to define perfection and to set standards of beauty was termed aesthetics or, the science of the beautiful, in 1753 by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Baumgarten was considered the first modern philosopher to approach the question of beauty systematically, introducing the term aesthetics and defining the experience of beauty as the sensory recognition of perfection. [Danto 1]. The works of his contemporary, Immanuel Kant, express the notion that beautiful objects are without a specific purpose and that judgments of beauty are not expressions of mere personal preference but, rather, universal. Similarly, Encarta defines aesthetics as: A branch of philosophy concerned with the essence and perception of beauty and ugliness, dealing with the question of whether such qualities are objectively present in the things they appear to qualify, or whether they exist only in the mind of the individual; hence, whether objects are perceived by a particular mode, the aesthetic mode, or whether instead the objects have, in themselves, special aesthetic qualities. Philosophy also asks if there is a difference between the beautiful and the sublime. [Danto 1] However, even with a definition at hand, arriving at a consensus on precisely what c...