Aesthetics Essay Research Paper Kant defined aesthetic — страница 2

works of art have a great variety of values. Artworks are, nevertheless, usually intentionally produced things. They are also things with characteristic modes of reception or consumption (7). Paintings are placed where we can se them in a certain way, music is enjoyed or analyzed mostly by being heard. This pattern of production and reception gives rise to two recurring questions in the philosophy of art: What relation does the work bear to the mind that produced it? And what relation does it bear to the mind that perceives and appreciates it (8). As an example, we may take emotion and music. We say that music has or expresses some emotional character. Since emotions are mental states, we may think that the emotion gets into the sounds by first being present in the mind of the

composer or performer. Or we may think that the listener’s emotional reactions are somehow projected back on to the sounds. Neither of these approaches has great plausibility, however, so that a new question emerges: The music all by itself somehow seems to point to, or stand for emotions – how? Aesthetics has yet to come to terms with this issue. There is a similar pattern in the case of artistic representation. In the question of what a picture depicts, what role is played by the artist’s intentions, and what by the interpretations which an observer may conjure up? Or does the painting itself have a meaning by standing in symbolic relations to items in the world? If the latter, how similar, and how dissimilar are depiction and linguistic representation? (8). Once one

starts to address problems at this level, the philosophy of art starts to concern the nature of philosophy as a whole.