Art and Aesthetics

An aesthetic is a set of criteria by which artistic merit can be judged.

But when it comes to the arts, the cliche is that "there's no disputing tastes." It's generally accepted that what one person likes another may well dislike, and there's nothing much more to be said.

Nevertheless, I think this view is suspect and ought to be resisted.

Whenever standards are rejected, it becomes impossible to provide any sort of guidance. It also becomes impossible to make any sort of meaningful judgement of quality; and this leads to injustice. We have no choice but to accept the best and worst achievements on an equal footing.

However, whenever there is an objective, that objective can be achieved well or badly. An aesthic that refuses to discriminate between the good and the bad, or to recognize that these terms mean anything as applied to art, implies that artists don't aim at anything whatsoever. And this leads to the view that anything and everything is art.

Some may, indeed, be willing to argue that this is the case. But as in any argument of this kind, the thing to do is to start by considering a few examples and seeing whether the results that we obtain in light of the theory are intuitive.