Even mentally disabled people show the same results. As a rule, no one makes ugly things on purpose. They are done as a result of indifference. In beautiful places, they take pictures and behave better. A book by Stefan Sagmeister and another world-renowned designer — Jessica Walsh. Do you have a copy? Image: phaidon. This is where the line between aesthetics and utility becomes blurred. Beauty is more than just a superficial strategy: it has a pervasive influence on our lives, stimulating our senses, and ultimately making the world a better place.

According to the paper by Ines Schindler, a senior research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, beauty is something that we seek for its own sake. The act of admiring the aesthetics is emotionally fulfilling and gives us pleasure, thus becoming an ultimate goal instead of being just a side order.

The Halo effect is a cognitive bias that in simple words means that what is beautiful seems also interesting, good, and usable. Aesthetic experience is similar to the concept of flow, states in his work Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist.

When people marvel at somebody or something, they immerse themselves in the process, with a strong attachment to the person or object that fascinates them. For example, the most favorite shade of my favorite color is cornflower blue:.

Photo by Peter Pieras from Pixabay. So any product featuring a similar shade immediately attracts my attention and I stop to get my dose of endorphins:. Financial Assistant App Animation by Shakuro. People prefer things that are easy to understand. In other words, the easier something can be processed, the more welcome it becomes to a person.

This idea explains why a complex idea presented in an accessible way can give a feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Moreover, even the captivating effect of the golden ratio is perhaps can be explained by the sensation of simplicity it gives to an onlooker. Slovakian designer Tomas Kral uses simplicity in his designs. Image: tomaskral. The power of simplicity and cleanness is widely embraced in the field of web and app design. Banking App Design by Shakuro.

Although our attitude to beauty is integrated into us as a species, in more detailed respect, people tend to disagree about much of what they find beautiful or ugly. Sometimes something too beautiful is perceived as ugly and vice-versa, like with the case of Barocco and brutalism style usage in web design. Take a look at the video by an English-New Zealand make-up artist and author Lisa Eldridge, where she shows the changeable nature of what was considered beautiful in the history of make-up:.

Design is not art. Design should solve the problem for which it is created. Today, the golden ratio is used to calculate aesthetic beauty treatments and to design interior and exterior art and architecture. The closer an item comes to the golden ratio, the more aesthetically pleasing it becomes. To that end, we continue to find items that have been designed with the golden ratio in mind aesthetically pleasing, and it remains our major definition for aesthetically pleasing today.

Aphrodite of Knidos. This ancient marble statue was carved thousands of years ago as a stunning testament to beauty and elegance.

Crafted with the divine ratio as its major design foundation, this symmetrical masterpiece has experienced some damage over time, but still appeals to us as an elegant statement of the art of the female body. Another big component of aesthetic design is complete symmetry, coverage, and fullness. Perfectly filled out lines are great examples of mirrored and fully designed and filled items that are incredibly aesthetically pleasing.

Less is more, and with aesthetically pleasing areas sometimes a simple look is the most secure. A smooth, calm, and open space is going to draw your eye to a few major focal points while also highlighting clean and open silhouettes, making it a supremely aesthetically pleasing room and overall design. Many people enjoy sunsets as aesthetically pleasing because of their artful combination of colors and linear designs. Sunsets mirror each other across the sky and create an expansive canvas for symmetrical and stunning images and color palettes, making them an extremely aesthetically pleasing object.

Kaleidoscope Patterns. With their colorful and bold patterns and statements, not everyone automatically assumes that kaleidoscope patterns could be considered aesthetically pleasing. But this is because the eighteenth-century theorist of taste lives in the 18th century, and so would be unable to situate that work in its twentieth-century art-historical context, and not because the kind of theory he holds forbids him from situating a work in its art-historical context.

Nor does there seem to be anything in the celebrated conceptuality of Brillo Boxes , nor of any other conceptual work, that ought to give the eighteenth-century theorist pause. Francis Hutcheson asserts that mathematical and scientific theorems are objects of taste Hutcheson , 36— Alexander Gerard asserts that scientific discoveries and philosophical theories are objects of taste Gerard , 6.

Neither argues for his assertion. Both regard it as commonplace that objects of intellect may be objects of taste as readily as objects of sight and hearing may be. Why should the present-day aesthetic theorist think otherwise? If an object is conceptual in nature, grasping its nature will require intellectual work. But—as Hume and Reid held see section 1. According to the psychological thesis, which aesthetic properties we perceive a work as having depends on which category we perceive the work as belonging to.

Hence the philosophical thesis, according to which the aesthetic properties a work actually has are those it is perceived as having when perceived as belonging to the category or categories it actually belongs to.

Since the properties of having been intended to be a painting and having been created in a society in which painting is well-established category are artistically relevant though not graspable merely by seeing or hearing the work, it seems that artistic formalism cannot be true.

But if we cannot judge which aesthetic properties paintings and sonatas have without consulting the intentions and the societies of the artists who created them, what of the aesthetic properties of natural items? With respect to them it may appear as if there is nothing to consult except the way they look and sound, so that an aesthetic formalism about nature must be true. Allen Carlson, a central figure in the burgeoning field of the aesthetics of nature, argues against this appearance.

He also maintains that the philosophical thesis transfers: whales actually have the aesthetic properties we perceive them as having when we perceive them as mammals, and do not actually have any contrasting aesthetic properties we might perceive them to have when we perceive them as fish.

If we ask what determines which category or categories natural items actually belong to, the answer, according to Carlson, is their natural histories as discovered by natural science Carlson , 21— Carlson is surely right that aesthetic judgments about natural items are prone to be mistaken insofar as they result from perceptions of those items as belonging to categories to which they do not belong, and, insofar as determining which categories natural items actually belong to requires scientific investigation, this point seems sufficient to undercut the plausibility of any very strong formalism about nature see Carlson for independent objections against such formalism.

One difficulty, raised by Malcolm Budd Budd and and Robert Stecker Steckerc , is that since there are many categories in which a given natural item may correctly be perceived, it is unclear which correct category is the one in which the item is perceived as having the aesthetic properties it actually has. Perceived as belonging to the category of Shetland ponies, a large Shetland pony may be perceived as lumbering; perceived as belonging to the category of horses, the same pony may be perceived as cute and charming but certainly not lumbering.

If the Shetland pony were a work of art, we might appeal to the intentions or society of its creator to determine which correct category is the one that fixes its aesthetic character.

But as natural items are not human creations they can give us no basis for deciding between equally correct but aesthetically contrasting categorizations. The eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of taste or sentimentalists was primarily a debate over the immediacy thesis, i.

It was not primarily a debate over the existence of principles of beauty, a matter over which theorists of taste might disagree. Kant denied that there are any such principles Kant , , but both Hutcheson and Hume affirmed their existence: they maintained that although judgments of beauty are judgments of taste and not of reason, taste nevertheless operates according to general principles, which might be discovered through empirical investigation Hutcheson , 28—35; Hume , — It is tempting to think of recent debate in aesthetics between particularists and generalists as a revival of the eighteenth-century debate between rationalists and theorists of taste.

But the accuracy of this thought is difficult to gauge. One reason is that it is often unclear whether particularists and generalists take themselves merely to be debating the existence of aesthetic principles or to be debating their employment in aesthetic judgment. But this requires being able to say what an aesthetic property is without reference to its being immediately graspable, something no one seems to have done.

But which class is this? The classes exemplified by beauty are presumably endless, and the difficulty is to specify the relevant class without reference to the immediate graspability of its members, and that is what no one seems to have done.

Of these, the papers by Isenberg and Sibley have arguably enjoyed the greatest influence. Isenberg concedes that we often appeal to descriptive features of works in support of our judgments of their value, and he allows that this may make it seem as if we must be appealing to principles in making those judgments. If in support of a favorable judgment of some painting a critic appeals to the wavelike contour formed by the figures clustered in its foreground, it may seem as if his judgment must involve tacit appeal to the principle that any painting having such a contour is so much the better.

But Isenberg argues that this cannot be, since no one agrees to any such principle:. But if in appealing to the descriptive features of a work we are not acknowledging tacit appeals to principles linking those features to aesthetic value, what are we doing? In this way we get others to see what we have seen, rather than getting them to infer from principle what we have so inferred. That Sibley advances a variety of particularism in one paper and a variety of generalism in another will give the appearance of inconsistency where there is none: Sibley is a particularist of one sort, and with respect to one distinction, and a generalist of another sort with respect to another distinction.

Isenberg, as noted, is a particularist with respect to the distinction between descriptions and verdicts, i. With respect to a distinction between descriptions and a set of judgments intermediate between descriptions and verdicts, Sibley is straightforwardly particularist. With respect to a distinction between a set of judgments intermediate between descriptions and verdicts and verdicts, Sibley is a kind of generalist and describes himself as such. We also appeal to properties that are inherently positive, such as grace, balance, dramatic intensity, or comicality.

To say that a property is inherently positive is not to say that any work having it is so much the better, but rather that its tout court attribution implies value. So although a work may be made worse on account of its comical elements, the simple claim that a work is good because comical is intelligible in a way that the simple claims that a work is good because yellow, or because it lasts twelve minutes, or because it contains many puns, are not.

But if the simple claim that a work is good because comical is thus intelligible, comicality is a general criterion for aesthetic value, and the principle that articulates that generality is true. But none of this casts any doubt on the immediacy thesis, as Sibley himself observes:. Hence aesthetic judgments are immediate in something like the way that judgments of color, or of flavor, are:.

But Sibley recognizes—as his eighteenth-century forebears did and his formalist contemporaries did not—that important differences remain between the exercise of taste and the use of the five senses.

Central among these is that we offer reasons, or something like them, in support of our aesthetic judgments: by talking—in particular, by appealing to the descriptive properties on which the aesthetic properties depend—we justify aesthetic judgments by bringing others to see what we have seen Sibley , 14— It is clearer, perhaps, that he does not succeed in defining the term this way, whatever his intentions.

Aesthetic concepts are not alone in being non-condition-governed, as Sibley himself recognizes in comparing them with color concepts. But there is also no reason to think them alone in being non-condition-governed while also being reason-supportable, since moral concepts, to give one example, at least arguably also have both these features.

Isolating the aesthetic requires something more than immediacy, as Kant saw. Given the degree to which Kant and Hume continue to influence thinking about aesthetic judgment or critical judgment, more broadly , given the degree to which Sibley and Isenberg continue to abet that influence, it is not surprising that the immediacy thesis is now very widely received.

The thesis, however, has come under attack, notably by Davies and Bender See also Carroll , who follows closely after Davies , and Dorsch for further discussion. Isenberg, it will be recalled, maintains that if the critic is arguing for her verdict, her argumentation must go something as follows:. Since the critical principle expressed in premise 1 is open to counter-example, no matter what property we substitute for p, Isenberg concludes that we cannot plausibly interpret the critic as arguing for her verdict.

Rather than defend the principle expressed in premise 1, Davies and Bender both posit alternative principles, consistent with the fact that no property is good-making in all artworks, which they ascribe to the critic. Davies proposes that we interpret the critic as arguing deductively from principles relativized to artistic type, that is, from principles holding that artworks of a specific types or categories—Italian Renaissance paintings, romantic symphonies, Hollywood Westerns, etc.

Bender proposes that we interpret the critic as arguing inductively from principles expressing mere tendencies that hold between certain properties and artworks—principles, in other words, holding that artworks having p tend to be better for having it Bender , Each proposal has its own weaknesses and strengths. Though it is clear that such relativizing reduces the relative number of counterexamples, we need good reason for thinking that it reduces that number to zero, and Davies provides no such reason.

If the critic argues from the truth of a principle to the truth of a verdict—as Davies and Bender both contend—it must be possible for her to establish the truth of the principle before establishing the truth of the verdict. How might she do this? It seems unlikely that mere reflection on the nature of art, or on the natures of types of art, could yield up the relevant lists of good- and bad-making properties.

At least the literature has yet to produce a promising account as to how this might be done. Observation therefore seems the most promising answer. To say that the critic establishes the truth of critical principles on the basis of observation, however, is to say that she establishes a correlation between certain artworks she has already established to be good and certain properties she has already established those works to have.

But then any capacity to establish that works are good by inference from principles evidently depends on some capacity to establish that works are good without any such inference, and the question arises why the critic should prefer to do by inference what she can do perfectly well without. The answer cannot be that judging by inference from principle yields epistemically better results, since a principle based on observations can be no more epistemically sound than the observations on which it is based.

None of this shows that aesthetic or critical judgment could never be inferred from principles. It does however suggest that such judgment is first and foremost non-inferential, which is what the immediacy thesis holds.

The Kantian notion of disinterest has its most direct recent descendents in the aesthetic-attitude theories that flourished from the early to mid 20th century. For Kant the pleasure involved in a judgment of taste is disinterested because such a judgment does not issue in a motive to do anything in particular.

For this reason Kant refers to the judgment of taste as contemplative rather than practical Kant , But if the judgment of taste is not practical, then the attitude we bear toward its object is presumably also not practical: when we judge an object aesthetically we are unconcerned with whether and how it may further our practical aims. Hence it is natural to speak of our attitude toward the object as disinterested.

To say, however, that the migration of disinterest from pleasures to attitudes is natural is not to say that it is inconsequential. According to Schopenhauer, we lead our ordinary, practical lives in a kind of bondage to our own desires Schopenhauer , This bondage is a source not merely of pain but also of cognitive distortion in that it restricts our attention to those aspects of things relevant to the fulfilling or thwarting of our desires.

Aesthetic contemplation, being will-less, is therefore both epistemically and hedonically valuable, allowing us a desire-free glimpse into the essences of things as well as a respite from desire-induced pain:.

The two most influential aesthetic-attitude theories of the 20th century are those of Edward Bullough and Jerome Stolnitz. The result of such attention is a comparatively richer experience of the object, i. Bullough has been criticized for claiming that aesthetic appreciation requires dispassionate detachment:. The properly distanced spectator of a tragedy, we might say, understands her fear and pity to be part of what tragedy is about.

The notion of the aesthetic attitude has been attacked from all corners and has very few remaining sympathizers. These and all such cases will be regarded by the attitude theorist as cases of interested or distanced attention to the performance, when they are actually nothing but cases of inattention to the performance: the jealous husband is attending to his wife, the impresario to the till, the father to his daughter, the moralist to the effects of the play.

But if none of them is attending to the performance, then none of them is attending to it disinterestedly or with distance Dickie , 57— Clearly the impresario is not attending to the performance, but there is no reason to regard the attitude theorist as committed to thinking otherwise. As for the others, it might be argued that they are all attending. The jealous husband must be attending to the performance, since it is the action of the play, as presented by the performance, that is making him suspicious.

The moralist must be attending to the performance, since he otherwise would have no basis by which to gauge its moral effects on the audience.

Stolnitz, it will be recalled, distinguishes between disinterested and interested attention according to the purpose governing the attention: to attend disinterestedly is to attend with no purpose beyond that of attending; to attend interestedly is to attend with some purpose beyond that of attending.

But Dickie objects that a difference in purpose does not imply a difference in attention:. There is again much here that the attitude theorist can resist. The idea that listening is a species of attending can be resisted: the question at hand, strictly speaking, is not whether Jones and Smith listen to the music in the same way, but whether they attend in the same way to the music they are listening to.

But Dickie is nevertheless onto something crucial to the degree he urges that a difference in purpose need not imply a relevant difference in attention. Disinterest plausibly figures in the definition of the aesthetic attitude only to the degree that it, and it alone, focuses attention on the features of the object that matter aesthetically. And this task seems always to result either in claims about the immediate graspability of aesthetic properties, which are arguably insufficient to the task, or in claims about the essentially formal nature of aesthetic properties, which are arguably groundless.

At times we seem unable to get by without them. Consider the case of The Fall of Miletus —a tragedy written by the Greek dramatist Phrynicus and staged in Athens barely two years after the violent Persian capture of the Greek city of Miletus in BC. Herodotus records that. How are we to explain the Athenian reaction to this play without recourse to something like interest or lack of distance? How, in particular, are we to explain the difference between the sorrow elicited by a successful tragedy and the sorrow elicited in this case?

The distinction between attention and inattention is of no use here. The difference is not that the Athenians could not attend to The Fall whereas they could attend to other plays. The difference is that they could not attend to The Fall as they could attend to other plays, and this because of their too intimate connection to what attending to The Fall required their attending to.

Theories of aesthetic experience may be divided into two kinds according to the kind of feature appealed to in explanation of what makes experience aesthetic. Internalist theories appeal to features internal to experience, typically to phenomenological features, whereas externalist theories appeal to features external to the experience, typically to features of the object experienced.

The distinction between internalist and externalist theories of aesthetic experience is similar, though not identical, to the distinction between phenomenal and epistemic conceptions of aesthetic experience drawn by Gary Iseminger Iseminger , , and Iseminger , 27,