Introduction to the Study of Human Aesthetics and the Key Terms Used in It

What is Art? I’ve often been asked this question, and the answer depends largely on the type of person you ask it to. Art is a broad spectrum of human creative activities involving the production of sound, visual or performing works, that express the artist’s creativity, conceptual notions, or specific technical skill, meant to be enjoyed primarily for their aesthetic beauty or emotional value.

Defining art has become a bit of an art form in itself. There are several schools of thought under the larger umbrella of aesthetics, each with its own merits and limitations. The main schools of thought are Expressionism, Minimalist, Fauvism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. I’ll briefly discuss each of these.

Expressionism is primarily a medium of expression – a way of painting or drawing on a large scale, using popular culture icons as a primary focus. The ‘expression’ used in Expressionism usually involves painting or drawing in a symbolic, aesthetic manner. The visual arts produced by Expressionism have become some of the most widely-recognized and influential masterpieces in the history of art.

Minimalism tries to describe the artist’s reaction to the environment he finds himself in. In other words, everything is reduced to the artist’s feeling of the human condition in that particular environment. Thus, everything is rendered more ‘fine’ than detailed or ‘real’. It shares many key terms with Conceptual Art, such as “the theme”.

Fauvism is an attempt to describe art as an aesthetic discipline. It differs from Minimalism in that it tends to value artistic objects rather than human subjects, relying less on the aesthetic appreciation of objects as a source of gratification. This school of thought comes most closely to the philosophy of Surrealism, the movement which took place towards the end of the twentieth century in which artists began to explore the visual effects of their works without considering the importance of content. The main difference between the various schools of thought about what is art is their interpretation of the relationship between the visual object and its utility. What is utilitarian is the way in which the utility of a work of art depends solely on its aesthetic value.

The key terms in the field of aesthetics are: Beauty, theory (aesthetic and emotional significance), value, importance, purpose, and sensibility. Beauty exists independently of humans while value and importance depend on human interaction. The importance of beauty is determined by the degree to which it satisfies our needs for satisfaction of aesthetic needs and the extent to which it satisfies our need for fulfillment of need-satisfaction. The importance of value is determined by the degree to which it satisfies our need for satisfaction of need-satisfaction.