Aesthetics as a science is a division of philosophy that studies the nature of art and our relationship to it. It arose in the 18th century in Europe and developed mainly in England, studying such fields as poetry, sculpture, music and dancing. Then they classified art into one section, calling it Les Beaux Arts or visual art.
Philosophers argued that the concept of “aesthetic norms” alone could not explain beauty. Naturally, beauty can have such rational properties as order, symmetry and proportion, but for the most part the concept of “art” is not standardized. Art people create intuitively, working with human feelings, emotions and emotions, without thinking about such a thing as aesthetic norms.
An aesthetic experience may include a mixture of different feelings, such as pleasure, anger, grief, suffering and joy. Emanuel Kant described art as an area that preferred the form of function. Beauty, according to him, depended on a specific figure with which it was directly related. For example, a horse can be beautiful no matter how well it runs.
Our judgments have long passed from medieval principles to the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" and, accordingly, to the idea that human intuition can be regarded as a source of knowledge.
However, to some extent, our understanding of the beautiful is often not as individual as it seems at first glance, but is interconnected with public opinion. Although the role of the individual in relation to art should not be discounted.
These two theories - personal perception and social recognition - are not mutually exclusive, but, on the contrary, interact and emanate from each other. In other words, aesthetic norms are in one way or another formed by society and, thus, are a kind of social norms. This conclusion can be drawn from the very definition of a concept.
Philosophers argue that a social norm is a group or social concept of how an individual should behave in a certain context. That is, it is society that determines the behavior that is most expected. Sociologists, along with psychologists, study how the “unwritten laws” of society determine not only our behavior, but also their attitude to certain things - world perception. Oddly enough, social norms influence our preferences, which we, by definition, consider to be purely individual.
For example, musical preferences, belonging to any political movement or favorite writer, of course, may differ from those that are elected by the majority. But modern critics come to this conclusion: if any work has at least one fan, then it has the right to exist and be called a work of art, regardless of the majority opinion.
Thanks to this position, more and more new directions have begun to appear in contemporary art. Such should be called rap and rock fashionable among young people in music, modernism and impressionism in fine art, etc.
However, some "artists" in pursuit of originality create such trends in art that go against the established concepts of aesthetics, beauty and acceptability. For example, everything related to excrement, acting either as a “ready-made subject of a work of art” or as material for its manufacture, cannot be considered beautiful. And this trend itself is considered contrary to the aesthetic norms recognized by modern man.
Social norms determine whether an individual is in or out of a group. The main question is whether certain aesthetic norms are created by an exceptional leader or whether they develop over time under the influence of the whole society.
