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LECTURE NOTES ON AESTHETICS: THEORIES OF ART AND BEAUTY

(From Blended Learning Modules, 2012)
By Dr. Allan C. Orate

Aesthetics concerns the nature or essence of beauty. To understand this, first of all you need to distinguish the
two ways of considering beauty: absolute and relative. To say that beauty is absolute means that something is
beautiful by virtue of itself; a thing has its own way of being beautiful regardless of the judgment of people. On
the other hand, the view that beauty is relative means that something is beautiful due to the perception and
conception of people; so it is said that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
In this lecture, I will explain to you six theories of beauty with their corresponding theories of art. To have a
general view of them, please take note of this diagram:

SUMMARY OF THE THEORIES OF BEAUTY AND ART

Aesthetic Absolute Standard Standard What is art?
Theories or Relative of Beauty of Ugliness
Idealism Absolute beauty Reality, Truth, Illusion, Falsity, Art is the imitation
by universal idea Knowledge, Good Ignorance, Evil or representation
of reality or nature
Functionalism Relative beauty Function, Malfunction, Art has didactic,
depending on Usefulness, Uselessness, political or
what the object Utility, Perfect Futility, Defect therapeutic
does values
Hedonism Relative beauty Experience of Experience of Art is pleasure,
depending on the pleasure for the pain for the fun and play
experience of a individual self individual self
person
Conventionalism Relative beauty Agreed to be Agreed to be ugly Art is what is
( or Cultural depending on the beautiful by by people in the made art by
Relativism) culture of people. people in the society people within the
society institution
Psychoanalytic Relative beauty Positive Negative Art is the artist’s
Theory depending on the suggestions as in suggestions as in expression of
unconscious the concept of traumatic emotion or idea
archetypes experience
Formalism Absolute beauty Order, Disorder, Art is the inherent
by mathematical Proportion, Disproportion, combination of
principles Integrity, Disintegrity, elements
Simplicity Complexity

Aesthetic Idealism. I’m sure you already encountered Plato in your other subjects. His contribution to learning
is vast, however, he is primarily a philosopher. If you understand him, it is said that you would understand the
whole of Western civilization. Plato formulated an aesthetic theory along with his theories of knowledge and
existence. For him, beauty is truth and reality. But reality does not exist in this world where we live, because
things here are changing and temporal. The reality are the transcendental forms or universal ideas existing in
the metaphysical world of being. What we perceive in our physical world of becoming are appearances,
shadows, images or reflections of reality. The real beauty, then, is not a physical thing, but the idea of beauty.
To experience the reality of beauty is for the philosophers to know its idea in their minds, and not simply to
perceive its reflection in this world.

Based on his worldview, Plato theorized about the essence of art. As this world is an appearance of reality, art
is an imitation of this world. There are three kinds of chair: (1) the idea of chair in the world of being which makes
up its reality known by a philosopher, (2) the physical chair in this world constructed by a carpenter, and (3) the
painting of a chair produced by a painter in the world of art. As another example, we again turn to the Titanic.
You saw in this movie the character Rose who is the artistic, beautiful woman. But Rose is an imitation of Kate

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Winslet who is the physical, beautiful woman. And Winslet in turn is an image of the idea and reality of beauty.
For Plato, art is dangerous because it makes us ignorant by leading our minds two times farther away from the
truth.

Plato’s notion of beauty applies to art. Called “Imitationism,” his theory defines art as the “imitation of the
appearance of reality.” It is interpreted as Representationalism in which art becomes a copy of nature, like your
ID picture that is a visual copy of your face. For Aristotle, art is also an imitation of things, but unlike Plato,
Aristotle believed that reality is inherent in this world. Following this insight, Leonardo noted that “art is a window
to nature,” and Shakespeare wrote that “art is putting mirror up to nature.”

Aesthetic Functionalism. This theory may be traced back from Socrates. Are you familiar with his quotation:
“Knowledge is virtue”? Here, the philosopher implied that people are defined by their actions based on the
dictate of the mind. Our rational operation constitutes our human nature. So what you do makes up who you
are. If you know that a student is meant for studying, then you must study your lessons so that you may realize
you true nature as a student. Interpreting this view in aesthetics, the essence of beauty is what things are
supposed to do, that is, their function, use or utility. An object is ugly if it is defective and useless for its purpose.
In this sense, you become a beautiful student because you study well and you learn, not because of the
whiteness of your skin or the designer jeans you wear.

Functionalism is much applied in architecture. There is a fundamental principle that “form follows function.” This
means that the shape, size, space and other formal properties of a building is determined by its use. Consider
your house. You know that each part of it has a function: the kitchen for cooking or the bedroom for sleeping.
The more efficient the use of a house is, the more beautiful it becomes. This is how the famous designers, Frank
Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier planned and built their works in the art of architecture.

In the other arts, some compositions in painting, sculpture and music are beautiful because they achieve a
particular purpose, such as for the ideological aim of changing the society as in Marxist theory of art, for didactic
purpose in morality, for therapeutic value in medicine, even for commercial worth in selling artworks for great
price. Also in functionalism, art is a talent and skill for doing things according to Lucretius. We talk about
virtuosity of the artists in fine arts. There are liberal arts which includes efficient use of language in grammar
and rhetoric. While in practical arts, there is craftsmanship in embroidery, ceramics, masonry, carpentry,
sartorial and culinary arts. There are martial arts too. For Rousseau, agriculture and metallurgy were the arts
that propelled the development of human civilization.

Aesthetic Hedonism. You may find hedonism to be a very inviting theory. As an ethical view about human life,
it was formulated by Aristipus and Epicurus. They believed that whatever is good is what brings pleasurable
experience to the individual person. Food, money and sex are good because they give self-interested pleasure.
Relating this insight to aesthetics, “pleasure and pain, therefore,” in the words of David Hume, “are not only
necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence.”

There is some truth in aesthetic hedonism considering our common experience of nature and art. We find the
rainbow beautiful because of the pleasure it presents to our eyes, while the sight of a shit is ugly because of its
terrible appearance and bad odor. Sometimes when we listen to music we feel relax, or when we watch a movie
we enjoy it. Art is beautiful because of the sensuous delight it affords us. But if the music is irritating to our ears,
or the film is boring, they bring us pain, and thus ugly. In culinary art, we appreciate the food not only because
it is nutritious, but more because it is delicious. Have you experienced this that when you were eating lechon,
you simply enjoyed the taste, and never minded its cholesterol that might bring you high blood and heart attack?

Plato and Aristotle did not altogether reject hedonism as an art theory. They claimed that imitation may also
bring pleasure, and for Plato art is a kind of play for the artist. According to Immanuel Kant too, art is more of
play and fun than of work, however, the person must be disinterested to the pleasure which art and things
provide. And for Albert Faurot, painting, sculpture and music are meant only “for giving pleasure and life
enhancement.”

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Aesthetic Conventionalism. Do you know “ethnocentrism”? It’s an anthropological term which means that
when you were born and now living within a society, you have embodied its ways from which you judge the
people outside your own community. This basic notion of Conventionalism may be interpreted based on the
ethical theory by Thomas Hobbes. He claimed that the moral values of good and bad depend on social
agreement. Morality is a construct made by human consensus through the civil law imposed by the sovereign
in a political state. Along this line of thinking, Aesthetic Conventionalism contends that the concepts and facts
of beauty are inventions of people. As members of society, we collectively create standards and rules for how
the artistic values of things are measured based on our shared tradition and culture.
There is no universal norm of beauty. Each society creates its standard. For the Padaung people in Myanmar,
women are considered beautiful if they have long necks full of spiral rings. In the Suri and Mursi community in
Africa, the beauty of women is determined by their wide lower lip with a big hole at the center. And in China
before 1917, women had the tradition of foot binding and made their feet small, only four inches long, looking
like the bud of a lotus flower.

For us, present Filipinos, these cultural practices might look weird, but only because we apply our own cultural
rule to them. We too have our peculiarities which in turn may not be acceptable to others, such as the practice
of tattooing by the Pintados, or the blackening of teeth by the Aetas during the pre-colonial period. What we all
need to do is to have a mutual respect for each other’s standards. The theory of conventionalism may also be
applied in understanding the evolution of fashion, trend and fad, as well as the meaning of baduy, bakya, jologs,
conyo. These are popular terms which denote different aesthetic norms prevailing within some times and places,
for some groups of people in our society.

As a theory of art, Conventionalism is related to Institutional Theory according to postmodern thinking. For
Arthur Danto and George Dickie, what makes something an art is due to the “art world,” an institution composed
of groups of powerful people. These people are the professionals and experts who justify anything to be art by
virtue of their influential status. Art has no fixed essence. It is defined by the art world through its own established
rules which are changing and depend on relations of power. Could you consider a toilet urinal an art? Yes! In
fact, one urinal became art, because it has been integrated within the art world, that means, it has been made
art by the renowned artist Marcel Duchamp, it has been exhibited by the art curators in museums and galleries,
and it has been affirmed by the art critics, historians and teachers who talk about it in their respective fields.

Aesthetic Psychoanalytic Theory. Probably you have taken up in Psychology the theory by Sigmund Freud.
As you remember, he advanced the theory of the unconscious or subconscious mind. The unconscious defines
and conditions our human personality. For Carl Jung, within the unconscious lurks collective standards which
we share as members of the human species, and which serve as archetypes or models of how we perceive
things to be beautiful or ugly. The perception of ugliness may be due to childhood trauma which lies dormant
within our subconscious, but when triggered by a certain stimulus revives our conscious memory of an ugly
object or experience.

As a theory of art, psychoanalysis is employed to uncover the artist’s desires, urges, inhibitions, depressions or
wishes which lie hidden in the artwork. All of us dream where we see fantastic images. Images in the arts are
like those in our dreams. They contain symbolic meanings; they are expressions of the unconscious content of
the mind which may be interpreted to reveal the artist’s personality. Freud analyzed the psychological make up
of Leonardo based on the painter’s dream about a bird flapping its tail inside his mouth, and on his
paintings whose subjects were mostly women such as The Mona Lisa and Leda the Swan, and from which
Freud concluded that Leonardo was a homosexual. In Reuben’s painting entitled Samson and Delilah, and in
Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles, are found a red blanket which is an archetypal symbol for sexual desire and sin
of the flesh. A lot of weird, dream-like images may be seen in the surrealist paintings by Salvador Dali, Mark
Chagall and Rene Magritte.

The basis of expressionist theory of art is the view that art is a revelation of the artist’s internal impulses is. In
his lesson on poetry, Aristotle proposed the term catharsis; it refers to a person’s overflowing emotion which
may be diverted into artistic production and creativity. According to Susanne Langer: “Art is the creation of
symbolic forms expressive of human feelings.” For Tolstoy, art is the “objectification of emotion.” And for
Benedetto Croce, art is not the physical substance but the ideas in the mind of the artist which may be expressed

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like words in a language. The best lesson that you learn from this theory is that beauty and art are not only
perceived by your senses, but are also felt by your heart and conceived by your mind.

Aesthetic Formalism. In the tradition of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, in its theory of hylomorphism, the
word “form” denotes the essence of a thing. The form of a beautiful thing makes up the essence of its beauty.
Anything ugly is “deformed”. Fundamentally, there are two formal principles of beauty: order and structure. The
two specific principles are proportionality and integrity. Simplicity is the principle of individuation of beauty. The
coordination of all these principles determine the beauty or ugliness of a thing.

According to aesthetic formalism, “beauty is the harmony of proper proportion.” This means that the parts of a
thing must be properly coordinated in shapes, sizes, colors and other elements, so that it may look beautiful.
Have you seen a woman with a vital statistic of 36-24-36? This horizontal measure should correspond to an
appropriate height, say five feet six inches tall, so that you may see the woman beautiful; but you would see her
fat if she stands four feet tall, and thin if seven feet. The drawing by Leonardo, The Vitruvian Man, is the best
illustration of the formalist theory of beauty and art. Taken from the canons by the ancient Roman architect
Vitruvius, Leonardo depicted the perfect measure of the human body based on the mathematical proportion of
its parts with one another. This proportion
is also said to be the harmony which underlies nature and the universe, thus attesting that, indeed, “man is the
measure of all things” as proposed by Protagoras. Another mathematical form of beauty is the Golden Measure
that is found in nature like in a nautilus shell, and was used by the ancient Greek architects in designing temples
and buildings.

Aesthetic formalism asserts that an artwork is to be perceived as a whole made up of its corresponding parts.
The relation of elements with one another composing the whole is the artistic form. Painting is the combination
of points, lines, shapes and colors; musical composition is formed by the coordination of rhythm, pitch, tempo
and dynamics; and a short story by characters, setting and plot. This means that, when you look at The Mona
Lisa, you don’t see a woman but a form, not a nose but a triangle, not a smile but a curve line. Art then is to be
regarded within itself, independent of its connections to anything outside. It is “art for art’s sake,” in the famous
statement by Oscar Wilde. This is the same with Clive Bell who said that art is concerned only with the
“significant form,” and has nothing to do with life.

Reference:
Orate, A. (2010). Lecture notes on aesthetics: Theories of art and beauty. Blended Learning Modules. Manila:
University of the East.

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