Frances to Cheerskep and others... The task of an individual person stating justifiable reasons for saying an art object that is given or driven or taken to their private sense "has" the property of beauty, aside from their offering a sound definition of such art, seems to fall in either the objectivist camp or the subjectivist camp, but to the detriment of excluding the relativist camp. On the objective side, a mathematical theory proposed by David Birkhoff comes to mind, where in the form of an art work its "complexity" is divided with its "order" to perhaps yield a global aesthetic measure of its valued beauty. On the subjective side, a philosophical theory proposed by Mortimer Adler suggested that the beauty of fine art might be called "pleasurable" beauty and "admirable" beauty, depending on the global experience evoked by the work. There is also the further theory of Susanne Langer where the neural structure of "feeling" in mind is held by her to be like the beautiful structure of "form" in art, and the later theory of Rudolf Arnheim where there may be a concrete connection between physical matter and psychical mind in regard to art. The theory of Richard Wollheim also comes to mind where ordinary objects that evoke aesthetic experiences are likely of two kinds called "natural aesthetic objects" and its "cultural aesthetic objects" to include those that are humanal or theal and social like artworks. These latter theories of Langer and Arnheim and Wollheim seem to fall mainly within a relativist camp. My curiosity hence is whether all these renowned theorists, and others like Curt Ducasse and Herbert Spenser and John Dewey, are still held in some serious regard today by academic scholars. Within the pragmatist camp, they have all been critically and analytically reviewed, and have therein been corrected or even assimilated into a broader realist theory of aesthetics, which seems useful in assaying and assessing the global beauty of artistic objects. This use could easily be accepted both by realists of an ideal or contextual kind and by antirealists of a notional or nominal kind. In any event and regardless of their standing in academia, none of these theories have been fully dismissed.
Cheerskep partly wrote in effect... The central question for me in aesthetics is what might be going on in our mind when we have that feeling termed in my way to be an "aesthetic experience" which responsive experience to an object of course will not be exactly the same in any other mind nor even need be derived from the same identical object. My felt experiences, in cherishing or enjoying or contemplating either ordinary objects in nature and society, or extraordinary objects like those called lofty fine art, is surprisingly often the same, thereby offering little important difference between nice stuff and fine art. In the case of experiencing those objects called or named as art, they are in my opinion merely ordinary objects of sense whose aesthetic criteria and artistic standard and honorific status is arbitrarily invented and conferred by mind. To assert that some essential mystical quality or substantial material fact has a unique value or peculiar importance to any class of objects like art is a mistake. It is therefore not possible to make a definition of art, if art is held to exist objectively as a global metaphysic category that is independent of mind. There simply are no objective global classes that exist in nature as art or nonart, nor as good art to be praised or as bad art to be rejected. The term art as an objective global class furthermore should not be held as being properly applied only to those works created by someone intending to evoke an aesthetic response in sentient contemplators, because there is no unique response to any work that is generically different from the response to any ordinary object found in everyday common life. The undeniable and indubitable felt experience by an individual person when sensing an object, whether the object be called art or not, is what should be explained by theorists. The aesthetic experience therefore ought to be the main criterion of interest and the main field of study in artistic circles. Such a guide or study will not identify a class as being art or an object as being artistic, but it may clarify exactly what an individual aesthetic experience might be. This approach nonetheless denies the independent objective existence for any generic global class of feelings or experiences that are the same for all persons or all peoples, whether the responses be aesthetic or artistic or otherwise. In any event, the aesthetic experience of each contemplator when sensing even an artistic work on each occasion or instance is often likely a vicarious feeling and not an aesthetic feeling. An aesthetic feeling may come from the deliberate aesthetic contemplation of an object, and may even be virtually the same on each intentional occasion, but this research and response even if similar in a whole group is not proof of an objective type or generic class. The scholarly thrust for theorists therefore should be to seek and find why such feelings arise when stimulated or contemplated by certain objects in specific contexts and not by others, and why any object will mysteriously give an aesthetic experience at all. Such a study does indeed deserve an examination and an explanation, even if a definition is not possible. To find and hold that an experience might be identified as being aesthetic would be significant, but would be of no significance in identifying a particular object as being artistic or a global object as being art. The differentia of separating art from nonart will therefore not be found in the aesthetic experience, and likely will not be found in anything, even though all humans feel the forms of objects in essentially the same manner and for virtually the same purpose and to effectively the same result. (Please accept my apologies for the editorial liberties taken by me in restating your position.)
