Thou Art

I sat next to some interesting people in the cinema the other day. One was a culturally knowledgeable woman, who was apparently trying to educate her teenage daughter. She commented on the songs playing before the advertisements started, the meaning and relevance of the French song playing during an advertisement, and then during the trailer for Fast & Furious 5 about the potential of film as an art form and how it is wasted on car chases. As if well-choreographed car chases are not a kinetic art form.

Art is simply directed perception, not necessarily of beauty (as the Dadaists showed), in order to evoke, or which evokes, (usually) positive aesthetic judgment. Firstly because even artists who reject beauty intend its absence to be judged positively, at least on an analytical level, and secondly because we tend to describe things that seem intended to evoke positive aesthetic judgment as art. There is the application of theory of mind, and hence a degree of empathy with the artist. Whether or not aesthetic judgment is made is often a matter of context, because context suggests whether aesthetic judgment was intended.

Is positive aesthetic judgment the same as the perception of beauty? Or is beauty something inherent in the ajudged? All we really have are perceptions and cognitions of an object, not its actual existence, so beauty must come with perception. This then forces us to equate beauty with positive aesthetic judgment, at least on a subconscious level. Intellectual processing is involved at this level, because extrinsic properties of the ajudged, such as the associated history or identity of the artist, affect judgment as well. Even category psychology can only tell us which properties are generally associated with beauty, such as symmetry and adherence to the golden ratio, but these properties are associated with beauty only after perception, and hence that beauty cannot be fully extended as a secondary property of the object with those properties. Creating positive subconscious aesthetic judgment in the absence of such properties depends on the skill of the artist in knowing when to break the rules. Artists who totally reject beauty then reject not just these properties, but the generation of any positive subconscious aesthetic judgment. Anyhow, such concerns are mostly semantic, a tragic consequence of the fact that words are often coined and used without precise definitions.

How then do properties become associated with beauty? A structuralist view of aesthetics would suggest that these properties are organised into structures or perceived to have structure, according to rules innate to us which are part of human nature. Some are naturally associated, possibly in non-human species as well, suggesting neurological, genetic and evolutionary reasons. In many other cases, these associations are acquired. Positive subconscious aesthetic judgment entails the firing of neurons in reward centres in the brain as a direct result of perception, rather than as a result of further cognition of the perception, although further cognition may modify perception and hence lead to such firing. What leads to the development of such circuits in our brains? The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure offers an explanation, i.e. objects we can process easily, whether due to its/our nature or our experience with it, cause aesthetic pleasure.

Yet beauty wears its beholder out. For something to be beautiful it must also be different enough, new enough, original enough. This leads us to what seems a paradox, that beauty is familiarity plus novelty. It is that combination of the same and the other, the yin and the yang, and perhaps in that sense the ultimate Platonic form. It is what you want to see but did not know was there to be seen. He who can offer you that is a consummate artist.

Many concepts are related to beauty, which I shall offer as a series of simplistic equations, which I hope nonetheless capture the essence of these concepts.

familiarity + novelty = beauty

vision + execution = art

technique + distinction = style

style + substance = design (the less idiomatic version would be art + function. Stylish football fulfills a supra-aesthetic function for the artist but not the viewer, so it may be art but not design.)

quality + subtlety = class