Questions in Aesthetics

(a partial list for the course and for your project):

• What is an aesthetic issue?
• Why think about art? Why not just experience it?
• What makes art different from nonart?
• Should we recognize a difference between fine art, commercial art, and craftwork?
• What do the arts have in common?
• Why does art matter?
• Are art and beauty essentially related?
• What is a symbol?
• How does art mean? How does the answer to this question differ with the different arts? (e.g., painting, music, dance).
• What's the status of aesthetic standards? Do they simply express individual or cultural tastes? Is there something objective about them?
• What's the nature of aesthetic properties? Are they in any sense "objective"? Or are they simply "in the eye (or ear) of the beholder"?
• How do the arts relate to spirituality and religion?
• Is there a connection between morality and art?
• How do the arts communicate emotions? How central is emotional communication to the nature of art?
• How do the arts relate to economic power and class structure?
• How closely is artistic expression and meaning tied to culture? To cultural ideas and philosophy? To cultural "forms of life"?
• What's the nature of aesthetic intelligence, and how does it relate to other sorts of intelligence?
• Can animals be artists?
• Is there any special connection between art and gender, or between art and sex or the erotic?
• How important is performance to art?
• Why aren't natural objects works of art? Or are they?
• Do artists reveal? Interpret? Express? All of the above