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Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, one of the major branches of philosophy. [3] [4] Beauty is usually categorized as an aesthetic property besides other properties, like grace, elegance or the sublime. [5] [6] [7] As a positive aesthetic value, beauty is contrasted with ugliness as its negative counterpart.
It is subdivided in two main parts - the Analytic of the Beautiful and the Analytic of the Sublime, but also deals with the experience of fine art. For Kant, beauty does not reside inside an object, but is defined as the pleasure that stems from the ″free play″ of imagination and understanding inspired by the object — which as a result we ...
In this theory, beauty is seen as an experience that has nothing to do with artistic merit: Beautiful works of art may be without any merit whereas good art is not necessarily beautiful. The theory resolves the apparent paradox of inborn and acquired preferences. For instance, infants prefer consonant melodies.
According to Christopher Dresser, the primary element of decorative art is utility. The maxim "art for art's sake," identifying art or beauty as the primary element in other branches of the Aesthetic Movement, especially fine art, cannot apply in this context. That is, decorative art must first have utility, but may also be beautiful. [15]
The more recent and specific sense of the word art as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art emerged in the early 17th century. [18] Fine art refers to a skill used to express the artist's creativity, or to engage the audience's aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of more refined or finer works of art.
The cubists, dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements struggled against this conception that beauty was central to the definition of art, with such success that, according to Danto, "Beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."
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James O. Young, of the University of Victoria, suggests that aesthetic absolutism can be defined as "Aesthetic propositions which only become true if, and only if, the proposition is a matter of fact, by virtue of the judgement being related to the art itself."