Baskadia

Question:

Explain why it is so difficult to define the "aesthetic", "beauty" and "art" basing your answer on the passage from Marcia Eaton's book Basic Issues in Aesthetics (1998) cited in the study guide. Your answer must cover the debate on the "aesthetic", "beauty" and "art".

Provide arguments and examples.

Answer:

According to Marcia Eaton, the visual and mental experience of city inhabitants has been influenced by the ugliness of architecture, buildings, and cities for ages. Poor aesthetics are recognized as disharmonious building organization in a characterless urban fabric and monotonous repetition of buildings with no variance. Aesthetic difficulties include visual congestion caused by excessive use of billboards and unplanned urban growth, as well as designs that are not responsive to ordinary people's tastes and values (Marcia Eaton, 1989).

Traditionally, beauty has been defined as the potential of some objects (including artworks) to elicit a specific form of unmediated/pure pleasure in viewers—aesthetic pleasure. Political-critical art does not appear to elicit aesthetic pleasure in viewers, according to this prevalent definition of beauty. Many contemporary critical and politically motivated artists purposefully create art that is undesirable to the senses.