Esthetics: The Theory Of Art

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
Said Oscar Wilde.
Esthetics — or aesthetics, if you prefer — is the philosophy of art.
It is a sub-branch of epistemology. Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, spawns esthetics like Superman spawns sequels.
Esthetics is classified as a sub-branch of epistemology because art is a by-product of the reasoning brain — which is why animals (for example) don’t create art or enjoy it — or, at any rate, not without some intensive human coaxing and coaching.
Art is the process of capturing through an artistic medium abstract ideas and the emotions that go along with them.
That is the definition of art.
Art is not a luxury item but a human necessity.
Quoting Oscar Wilde once again, who is at his best in the esthetic arena:
“The function of art is to recreate, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvelous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon.”
Art starts with an abstraction such as jealousy, and in an artistic creation like Othello, shows us how in human life jealousy manifests.
The degree to which an artistic creation persuades or seems plausible is the degree to which it is good or bad. Contrary to popular belief, art can and should be held to standards. Of a poor film, therefore, it is perfectly proper to say “This movie sucks!”
Painting and drawing perform the same function as our Othello example, but in a purely visual manner.
Sculpture does so by visual-tactile means.
Music, which is unique among the arts, captures so-called emotional abstractions, via sound, so that when we hear music, we feel ourselves perhaps excited, or melancholic, or thoughtful, or sexy, whathaveyou.
It should also be noted here (not quite parenthetically) that music’s modus operandi is not well understood — not in terms of how the brain organizes sound into euphony, and why, exactly, melody and harmony strike human ears in the precise way that they do.
To qualify as a legitimate art form, the medium must have the power to convey ideas in a perceptual form — which is to say immediately.
That’s why culinary art is not, in the true sense, an actual art but a skill: the best foie gras in the world cannot convey even the simplest human abstraction, let alone something as complex as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The same thing is true of sewing, gem-cutting, carpentry, and a million other skills and trades as well. They are not actually arts because they don’t have the power to capture or convey a wide range of abstract meaning. They cannot objectify reality through their medium.
That’s what art does. That is why art is a necessity.
To truly qualify as art, the medium must be able to reproduce nature, via sensory data, and then infuse that data with conceptual content.
Plays and screenplays, for instance, are art.
Movies are art.
Novels and poems are art.
Dancing is art but not a primary: it depends upon music.
This same is true of acting: it depends upon a script, which is one of the reasons that scripts sometimes feel flat when they’re read rather than watched, and why an actor without a script is like a clam without a shell.
Cinematography, like photography, occupies the middleground. Both contain an artistic component, and yet both are stylistically confined — they record more than they create — and are therefore more skill than art.
(Journalism is analogous to this: it too has an artistic component — specifically, in the freedom of writing style afforded it — but journalism also primarily records.)
Art came into existence within the human species because the human brain operates by means of abstractions, which is to say words, which is to say ideas formed by means of words.
Abstractions are thoughts — or, to put that more precisely, abstractions are the human way of grasping the natural world.
We do this by means of thought.
And we think by means of words.
Art assists.
And that is why esthetics is a sub-branch of epistemology.
The senses — sight, sound, touch, taste, and hearing — are what feed our brains with the raw sensory data Oscar Wilde speaks of in the previous quotation.
The brain then processes this raw sensory data conceptually — that is, through a process of abstraction, or, in other words, through thinking — which is essentially the process of learning words and grasping what in reality those words denote.
By means of sensory data, art recasts reality and shows us our abstractions made solid.
Art thereby enhances reality.
And because, as its name implies, art is artificial, it also perfects reality.
Artists themselves are among the most inarticulate when it comes to explaining the nature and function of art. To get beyond their artsy mumbo-jumbo, so that we can see clearly at last what gives rise to art, we need not listen to artists and art critics, but instead merely observe how the artistic drive develops in children. “Through Children,” said Dostoevsky, “the soul is healed.”
Observe what the child with that big stick of sidewalk-chalk draws upon the concrete.
A large yellow crescent with blue stars around it.
A white house in a field.
A blazing sun coming up over black mountains.
Animals.
Stick figures.
Death.
War.
Now ask yourself this: what drives a child to make those drawings?
What is she thinking about that makes her want to set it down in concrete form?
What dictates her subject-matter?
Why did she choose this and not that?
What is the child doing?
And, as important, what is that process doing for her?
Ask yourself:
Why did prehistoric humans paint animals and hunting scenes upon cave walls? What drove that urge? Why did these people choose the subjects they chose? And what did painting those things fulfill within them?
Why have humans always invented stories?
Why have humans always enjoyed listening to those stories, or seeing them played out?
Why the human invention of musical instruments?
Why did David “dance with all his might before the Lord”?
What need is being fulfilled in this?
The answer to these questions is the same:
Each one of those things, through whichever medium, captures the abstract and makes it real and immediate.
Humans — the rational animal — need this because our rational mind operates in an opposite manner: it is thoughtful, inductive, long-range. Art brings the entirety of the elegant universe into our immediate ken.
Art makes the conceptual perceptual.
There is no mood or passion that art cannot give us…. Art is mind expressing itself under the conditions of matter, and thus, even in the lowliest of her manifestations, she speaks to both sense and soul alike…. It is through art, and only through art, that we can realize our perfection; through art, and through art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence…. Like Aristotle, like Goethe after he had read Kant, we desire the concrete, and nothing but the concrete can satisfy us.
– Oscar Wilde


