Weren't aesthetic ideal more widely accepted in the past? Yes they were but when you examine them they are open to variation and when those aesthetic rules were widely accepted, artists and theorists worried about them becoming formulas. See Sir Joshua Reynolds for instance. Even the Beaux arts notion of Style was far more open-ended regarding experimentation and expression than is assumed. I've written about this topic: Can Art Be Moral Again? (published on website www.neotericart.com). Also, keep in mind that for most of history art was not art in the modern sense, the self-justifying aesthetic sense, but was in service to religion or the state. Many have written about art before the era of art (Hans Belting). When art is utility in that sense it is an an applied art and rules and goals -- ideals -- are practical and desired. There is a good, ideal way, for instance, to lay brick or hang a door. But if bricks or doors were suddenly to be the chosen abstract media for endless experimentation with artistic form and the limits of human expression, their one-time 'ideal' functions as bricks and doors would be questioned, probably discarded. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, July 27, 2012 4:54:04 AM Subject: Re: is list dead? On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 4:30 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > Yes, but only in the sense of diverting discussion from aesthetic ideas. > Why do > you say ideals? That implies that the nature of the aesthetic is > recognized and > understood and that the role of aesthetic inquiry is simply to mark the > best > path to those ideals. I don't think it's clear what ideals, if any, are > aesthetic or if the aesthetic is a process instead of a route to an > idealized > goal. > wc > But weren't aesthetic ideals more widely accepted in the past? And don't aesthetic ideals still exist in foreign countries?: http://books.google.com/books?id=GmRGQwAACAAJ&dq=%22aesthetic+ideals%22&source=bl&ots=MNUh2LZmYW&sig=kc6fBG17E3W9zgMM-OnPrg1FQ_Y&hl=en&sa=X&ei=SGESULK6IsnmiwKnqID4Ag&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAg
