It's not always easy to decide what's beautiful...

So I’m a little critical on this blog — I’ll admit it. Every week, I recommend films, video games and television shows that I think are good and I tear apart others that I think are pretty lousy. Clearly, my tastes are particularly, and my preferences are for things that I consider good. Most people develop their own sets of preferences for things that they find good which may or may not conflict with my own. That’s part of being human.

But have you ever stopped and wondered how we arrive at conclusions about what is good and what is bad, what is perfect and what is flawed?

The field of criticism is based on a philosophical principle called “aesthetics,” and it’s the basis that we use to determine what we like and what we don’t like. Most people have an intuitive grasp of aesthetics, but never bother to develop their understanding to a point that they can broaden their own horizons very easily. And there’s another problem, too – the problem of whether or not there is some universal sense of “good” aesthetics (i.e. whether truth and beauty are directly related) or whether or not aesthetic values are determined by culture and experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the issue and see if we can arrive at any conclusions.

Have you ever been shown a piece of artwork that everyone else seemed to love, but which you absolutely despise? Or, conversely, have you ever found yourself enjoying a piece of artwork that everyone else tells you is terrible?

Is this simply a problem of your own lack of understanding of what is beautiful and what lacks beauty, or is it a problem of mere snobbishness on the part of the people around you?

It’s very easy to run into either of these scenarios in the world of art, because so many people have such varying ideas about what makes art good. Most people approach art from a fairly simple point of view — they look at the picture, evaluate it, make a judgment, and move on. Because they don’t really understand what they’re looking at, they’re not able to judge the deeper values of the work — aesthetically speaking, the composition of the picture is either compelling to them, or it is not.

A person who has taken a course on art appreciation might approach a work differently. He or she will understand that it is not just the composition of art that makes it worthwhile, but also the artist’s unique vision of the world. He or she will also be able to place the art within something of a context by examining its style and comparing it to the work of the masters of the artist’s era. Aesthetically speaking, someone who has some understanding of the field of art will judge the piece relative to his or her understanding of the world around it.

A person with experience in creating art will approach the work differently as well. He or she will look at the technical aspects of the piece, judging where the artist followed the rules, and where the artist broke them. This person will also pay more attention to the technique used to create the piece, and will talk about the methods that the artist used to deceive the eye and establish the illusions of depth and space. There might be some discussion about how the artist sees the world. Aesthetically speaking, a person who has created art will judge the piece on his or her understanding of the techniques used to create it.

The question, then, is whether these three people will arrive at the same conclusion ultimately, using their understanding of aesthetics to select the truly remarkable pieces while avoiding the truly flawed ones.

When this question is posed towards examining the work of classical or renaissance artists, it is likely that all three groups will fall in line and say that works by artists like Michelangelo are truly beautiful. But do they say this because there is something automatically beautiful about Michelangelo’s work, or do they say this because they all have been told that this work is beautiful, accepted the view, and used it to frame their opinions? Some might argue that Michelangelo’s work is intrinsically beautiful, but most would agree that the idea of beauty derives from cultural cues more than anything else. There are certainly times when these views do not convene.

Andrew Wyeth's most famous painting, "Christina's World"

The great American artist Andrew Wyeth died over the last week, and I was quite sad to see that even in his passing, people in the art world were debating whether or not Wyeth was truly an artist, or merely an illustrator. If you look at Wyeth’s art, there is little doubt that he was one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. His work was tremendous, and most of his paintings took bold risks. Some looked amazingly like photographs, while others looked as if they were focused purely on the study of light. Wyeth had a way of  creating paintings that told stories about rural America in a way that no artist ever has. The reason that art critics shunned Andrew Wyeth is because his work was realistic instead of being abstract and expressionist. At the same time, they criticized him for seeing a world that no longer exists, and while they acknowledged his skill as a draftsman and painter, they said that his work was shallow and lacking philosophy. In other words, they labeled his work base for a perceived lack beauty simply because it was popular.

One of Wyeth's "Helga" paintings

(Here’s a great article on Andrew Wyeth if you’re not familiar with him, but interested in learning more about him.)

And this is the problem with aesthetics. If one bases his or her own views off gut reactions, he or she will often reject that which is not immediately familiar or understood. That’s bad, because we need to broaden our horizons from time to time to experience new things. But at the same time, if one bases his or her own views off the opinions of the “experts,” he or she can be steered into a pecular sort of snobbery that will prevent him or her from truly enjoying works that everyone else likes.

So, how do we find a middle ground? We develop our sense of aesthetics by truly studying the things that are thought to be great and broadening our understanding of the reasons behind the thinking. At the same time, we accept our gut reactions and express our opinions in such a way that we open up the floor for explanations as to why we’re wrong. We accept that we won’t like everything that others like, but at the same time, we attempt to understand why people like things that we find distasteful.

I’ll give a real world example. I despise country music, and I won’t listen to it if I’m given the choice. My wife, on the other hand, loves it, and it’s all she’d listen to if she were given the chance. I often accuse her of having poor taste, and tease her for not being able to identify classical music compositions. At the same time, I insist that generes like bluegrass and classic rock are superior to country music, based on my own sense of aesthetics.

Am I right? My reasons for disliking country music are founded on many good aesthetic principles. My chief objection with country music is that it’s generally sentimental and sappy, but my secondary objection is that the stuff my wife listens to on the radio is essentially pop music with a twang. Unfortunately for me, I’m misjudging the genre based on a part of the whole. As it turns out, there is actually quite a lot of good country music out there, sung by people like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Sr., Lorette Lynn and others. It doesn’t offend my sensibilities in the slightest. And yet because I despise the stuff I hear on the radio, I make the judgment that all country music is bad.

And that’s my point about aesthetics. Ultimately, we have to learn to broaden ourselves and ask why we’ve developed negative attitudes towards certain things. There’s no denying that a lot of artistic endeavors are just crummy. I’ve worked on quite a few of those myself. But there are also many artistic efforts that are merely misunderstood. That’s one of the reasons why we must develop a sense of aesthetics that transcends snobbery and that allows us to consider new things — otherwise, we miss out on the new and different and find ourselves firmly rooted in only the things that we know we like. And what kind of fun is that?