Applied aesthetics
Encyclopedia
Applied aesthetics is the application of the branch of philosophy of aesthetics to cultural constructs.
combines many diverse disciplines, each of which may have their own rules of aesthetics. The aesthetics of cinematography
are closely related to still photography
, but the movement of the subject(s), or the camera and the intensities, colors, and placement of the lighting
are highly important. Sound recording, editing, and mixing are other, highly important areas of film, often closely related with the musical score. As in Theatre
, art direction, in the design of the sets and shooting locations also applies, as well as costume design
and makeup. All of these disciplines are closely inter-twined and must be brought together by the aesthetic sensibilities of the director
.
Montage, or editing is probably the one discipline unique to film, video, and television. The timing, rhythm and progression of shots form the ultimate composition of the film. This procedure is one of the most critical element of post production, and incorporates sound editing and mixing, as well as the design and execution of digital special effects.
In the case of a video installation
, the method of presentation becomes critical. The work may be screened on a simple monitor
, projected on a wall or other surface, or incorporated into a larger sculptural installation. A video installation may also involve sound, with similar considerations to be made based on speaker design and placement, volume, and tone.
are usually associated with the sense of vision
. A painting or sculpture, however, is also perceived spatially by recognized associations and context, and even to some extent by the senses of smell, hearing, and touch. The form of the work can be subject to an aesthetic as much as the content.
In painting, the aesthetic convention that we see a three-dimensional representation rather than a two-dimensional canvas is so well understood that most people do not realize that they are making an aesthetic interpretation. This notion is the basis of abstract impressionism
.
In the United States during the postwar period, the "push-pull" theories of Hans Hofmann
, positing a relation between color and perceived depth, strongly influenced a generation of prominent abstract painters, many of whom studied under Hofmann and were generally associated with abstract expressionism
. Hofmann's general attitude toward abstraction as virtually a moral imperative for the serious painter was also extremely influential.
Some aesthetic effects available in visual arts include variation, juxtaposition, repetition, field effects, symmetry/asymmetry, perceived mass, subliminal structure, linear dynamics, tension and repose, pattern, contrast, perspective, 3 dimensionality, movement, rhythm, unity/Gestalt, matrixiality and proportion.
, a by-product of computer programming that raises new questions about what truly constitutes art. Although paralleling many of the aesthetics in traditional media, digital art can additionally draw upon the aesthetic qualities of cross-media tactile relationships; interactivity; autonomous generativity; complexity and interdependence of relationships; suspense; and playfulness.
Artists working in this type of art are often forced to justify their use of a computer rather than a traditional medium, leading to, like the debate over Warhol's "Brillo Pad Boxes", a question of what constitutes art.
The criticisms of digital art are many. For example, graphics programs allow perfect shading to be achieved with little to no effort. In other types of programs, there is a sense that because of the variety of tools, filters, distortions, etc., that an artist has a veritable image factory at their disposal. The various criticisms ultimately come down to the issue of "what effort is the artist putting into their work?"
The 3d art community frequently references that while the programs they utilize render and shade the objects, their efforts are more akin to the sculptor or architect, presenting an aesthetically arranged, lighted, and textured scene. The users of the other programs such as Photoshop or Gimp point out that while they may have many tools at their disposal, the art itself must be that much more detailed and imaginative to stand out. In both cases there is the challenge of overcoming the barriers of limited technology and the lack of direct contact with one's medium.
relates to the visual experience of map reading and can take two forms: responses to the map itself as an aesthetic object (e.g., through detail, colour, and form) and also the subject of the map symbolised, often the landscape (e.g., a particular expression of terrain which forms an imagined visual experience of the aesthetic).
Cartographers make aesthetic judgments when designing maps to ensure that the content forms a clear expression of the theme(s). Antique maps are perhaps especially revered due to their aesthetic value, which may seem to be derived from their styles of ornamentation. As such, aesthetics are often wrongly considered to be a by-product of design. If it is taken that aesthetic judgments are produced within a certain social context, they are fundamental to the cartographer's symbolisation and as such are integral to the function of maps.
, color-harmony, stylishness, catchy jingles, slogans, craftsmanship, soothingness, attentiveness, authenticity, or the related perceived experiences associated with product consumption.
Marketing consists of intriguing the human mind to think in a direction where it would not have done so previously - or not without outside input. Human curiosity, self gain or mental adjustment is what drives marketing development itself.
include lyricism, harmony
, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, volume dynamics, resonance, playfulness, color, subtlety, elatedness, depth, and mood (see musical development
). Aesthetics in music are often believed to be highly sensitive to their context: what sounds good in modern rock music
might sound terrible in the context of the early baroque
age.
. Performance art
often consciously mixes the aesthetics of several forms. Role-playing games are sometimes seen as a performing art with an aesthetic structure of their own, called RPG theory
.
, short stories
, novel
s and non-fiction
, authors use a variety of techniques to appeal to our aesthetic values. Depending on the type of writing an author may employ rhythm, illustrations, structure, time shifting, juxtaposition, dualism, imagery, fantasy, suspense, analysis, humor/cynicism, and thinking aloud.
Although food is a basic and frequently experienced commodity, careful attention to the aesthetic possibilities of foodstuffs can turn eating into gastronomy
. Chefs inspire our aesthetic enjoyment through the visual sense using colour and arrangement; they inspire our senses of taste and smell using spices, diversity/contrast, anticipation, seduction, and decoration/garnishes. In regard to drinking water
, there are formal criteria for aesthetic value including odour, colour, total dissolved solids
and clarity. There are numerical standards in the U.S.
for aesthetic acceptability of these parameters.
Note, however, a use of a word translated to "culinary" in Adorno's aesthetics. Adorno distinguishes between technically accurate and "beautiful" musical interpretation, and an interpretation higher which brings out the "truth" in the musical text: interpretations more rehearsed, with more time for rehearsal, but which might sound strange to audiences pandered-to by popular conductors (perhaps in the way Glenn Gould enstranges the music of Beethoven).
Unfortunately for the ordinary reader of Adorno, this isn't something technical such as "original instruments". It is instead the work of art that doesn't pander to what the audience "wants"...its whims.
This is linked to a Marxist interpretation which instead of treating the audience as an all-powerful "customer" adopts a teacherly or even priestly stance "above" the mere audience, something only the most "snobbish" of French chefs would dare, proposing to teach it to like Higher Things.
There are rarefied forms of *haute* cuisine; but note that common sense usually has a horselaugh about precious Yuppies eating designer food which it withholds about concert-goers listening to Berg; your man in the street merely thinks the latter crowd to be odd jobs, and doesn't resent them, meaning that ethical judgements play a role in aesthetic judgements that specialists in ethics, and specialists in aesthetics, systematically disregard...but which artists such as Tolstoy regarded as central.
Based on Adorno's theory of the (merely) culinary as not being "art", this would seem to mean that it is a joke, for an Adornoite (if such a person exists meaningfully), to treat cooking as an art form or eating as art appreciation.
Monty Python would often reverberate with this sort of arcana in a strange way: in the Mr. Creosote passage of The Meaning of Life, an enormously fat man is persuaded by the fawning waiter to have one more sweet whereupon Mr. Creosote throws up all over the dining room. Note that the scene has more claims to be art, despite being nauseating, than designer food.
This MAY be an unconscious comment on any theory of art that blindly equates "fine dining" and a visit to the picture galleries, a sort of tourist equation in which picture galleries are overrun in fact by post-prandial Mr. Creosotes. Even the ordinary man in the street would say that the starving artist visiting the gallery has a "better" apprehension of the higher, more inner, more elusive aura of the art work than Mr. Creosote, which means that for some authors, including Adorno, there is a nexus between ethics (which nearly tracks aesthetics polyphonically, where we use "good" and "bad" in ethics to characterise people and their deeds, and in aesthetics to judge what to buy).
The possibility of a rejection of the culinary in art starts with Kant's theory of the sublime but does not end there; post Holocaust (with its Nazis playing Bach: with Adorno's questions about poetry after Auschwitz) the culinary, and whether the German officer enjoying a "fine" meal has much of anything to do with art, become important aesthetic questions.
A Marxist theory of art would probably conclude that the chef cannot be an artist, lacking autonomy and beholden to the customer, Mr. Creosote, in all regards.
has focused upon the study of human-computer interaction and creating user-friendly devices and software applications. Software itself has aesthetic dimensions ("software aesthetics"), as do information-technology-mediated processes and experiences such as computer video games and virtual reality
simulations. Digital culture is a distinct aesthetic to judge the appeal of digital environments such as Web browser
s, website
s, and icons, as well as visual and aural art produced exclusively with digital technologies. The notion of cyberspace
has sometimes been linked to the concept of the sublime
.
Aesthetics in information technology do also apply to the act of designing software itself. Numerous programmers profess to experiencing a dimension of elegance
in the functionality and structuring of software at the source code
level. For example, a short, powerful expression that clearly expresses the intent of the code can be considered "beautiful" to the poor programmer charged with maintaining said code. This contrasts with code that is (as code all too often is) short, cryptic, unclear, and unnecessarily "clever". In-line documentation, while not strictly code, can be considered something a programmer would need to be good at in order to write beautiful code. Correctly done, documentation can accentuate the effect of beautiful code, when it is clear, concise, explains the intent of the programmer, and expands the understanding that one can gain by simply looking at the code. Comments that are redundant (only explain what the code already explains), cryptic, and overly long or short can detract from beautiful code. Aesthetics in programming can also have a practical level: Under the right conditions, elegant code can run faster and more efficiently, and (most importantly) be less prone to errors.
Critics of this would say that the need to justify "good design" by reference to "cost savings" mean that "good design" isn't "art" insofar as art is autonomous, and many aestheticians would have to say that art emerges in applications only in excess of cost savings. In information technology, theorists of "user friendliness" have to justify their "user friendly" applications and often disregard basic statistics when most users like a system, but a significant minority hate it.
That is, they may discard the standard deviation of their data in order to sell a good design for the best price, and this has nothing to do with art insofar as art is a useful signifier (if you cost-justify everything you are a businessman and not an artist).
A folk phenomenon among real programmers is in fact their frequent hatred of practice described in books as best practice and good design. A Marxist theory of industrial "art" would ascribe this to alienation, in which subaltern programmers never produce code they own in any meaningful sense, with the problem that the same sort of alienation, soldiering, and bloody-mindedness appeared, it seems, in Soviet computing shops.
The most sophisticated writings on the topic of aesthetics are to be found in the late Edsger Wybe Dijkstra's
corpus of papers and notes on computing: in Dijkstra, the art is real, but Ying with respect to the Yang of applications; Dijkstra seemed to have refused any analysis of programming as other than applied mathematics and, strange to say, never pursued what Adorno (the midcentury theoretician of whom Dijkstra was apparently unaware) called a purely culinary elegance...despite the protests of others that his work was "hard to digest", in Adorno's words not very culinary.
Dijkstra's beauty refused the notion of accessibility as do many "artistic" works ancient and modern: it was hard as is the Grosse Fuge, Beethoven's syncopated and neo-primitive late movement. In fact, no aesthetician makes "user friendliness" canonical and necessary in a work of art, strange to say in an era when supposedly the masses rule through the market; for most art theorists, it is nice if the canaille can enjoy some pretty rondo of Mozart and whistle it on the street, but would deny that this property must be shared by the Masonic prelude and fugue or the Requiem mass.
This makes strange any claim that a programmer making his work "user friendly" to all comers is some sort of artist by virtue of that. For Dijsktra, truth was primary, and beauty the automatic result.
While both dimensions of perceived aesthetic are drawn from a pool of aesthetic judgments, they are clearly distinguishable from each other.
In a recent study Moshagen and Thielsch found four core dimensions of website aesthetics:
Simplicity and diversity have repeatedly been treated as formal parameters of aesthetic objects throughout the history of empirical aesthetics. Colors are a very critical property of aesthetic objects. Craftsmanship addresses the skillful and coherent integration of the relevant design dimensions. While simplicity is highly correlated to classical aesthetics as mentioned by Lavie and Tractinsky, the other three factors could be treated as deeper differentiation of expressive aesthetics.
Best practices for aesthetic Website Design
• Create visual clues based on groupings; related items or links are grouped together while unrelated items are separated.
• Use headings and subheadings to allow visual scanning of content.
• Use headings, subheadings, font sizes, bold fonts and italic fonts in proportion to the importance of the item.
• Align elements on a page so that they are all visually connected; size all elements on the page to create balance and unity; nothing should look out of place unless you have a specific reason for the effect.
• Choose a font style that supports the site atmosphere and stick to it; limit styles to 2 at the most.
• Use images and photos for visual appeal and to communicate ideas.
• Use one set of design elements across your website.
Website Design Aesthetics and Credibility
Website design influences user’s perception of site credibility. One of the factors that influences whether users stay or go on a web page is the page aesthetics. Another reason may involve a user's judgment about the site's credibility. Findings indicate that when the same content is presented using different levels of aesthetic treatment, the content with a higher aesthetic treatment was judged as having higher credibility. We call this the amelioration effect of visual design and aesthetics on content credibility. Holmes suggests that this effect is operational within the first few seconds in which a user views a web page. Given the same content, a higher aesthetic treatment will increase perceived credibility.
are often compared with music and poetry. Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős
expressed his views on the indescribable beauty of mathematics when he said "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
beautiful." Math appeals to the "senses" of logic, order, novelty, elegance, and discovery. Some concepts in math with specific aesthetic application include sacred ratios in geometry
, the intuitiveness of axioms, the complexity and intrigue of fractals, the solidness and regularity of polyhedra, and the serendipity
of relating theorems across disciplines. There is a developed aesthetic and theory of humor in mathematical humor.
has also considered aesthetics, with the advent of neuroesthetics
, pioneered by Semir Zeki
, which seeks to explain the prominence of great art as an embodiment of biological principles of the brain, namely that great works of art capture the essence of things just as vision and the brain capture the essentials of the world from the ever-changing stream of sensory input. See also Vogelkop Bowerbird
.
: Designers need many aesthetic qualities to improve the marketability of manufactured products: smoothness, shininess/reflectivity, texture, pattern, curviness, color, simplicity, usability, velocity, symmetry, naturalness, and modernism.
The staff of the Design Aesthetics section focuses on design, appearance and the way people perceive products. Design aesthetics is interested in the appearance of products; the explanation and meaning of this appearance is studied mainly in terms of social and cultural factors. The distinctive focus of the section is research and education in the field of sensory modalities in relation to product design. These fields of attention generate design baggage that enables engineers to design products, systems, and services, and match them to the correct field of use.
structures. Common aesthetic design principles include ornamentation, edge delineation, texture, flow, solemnity, symmetry, color, granularity, the interaction of sunlight and shadows, transcendence, and harmony.
Interior design
ers, being less constrained by structural concerns, have a wider variety of applications to appeal to aesthetics. They may employ color, color harmony, wallpaper, ornamentation, furnishings, fabrics, textures, lighting, various floor treatments, as well as adhere to aesthetic concepts such as feng shui
.
Over half of mankind lives in cities; although it represents a lofty goal, planning
and achieving urban aesthetics (beautification
) involves a good deal of historical luck, happenstance, and indirect gestalt. Nevertheless, aesthetically pleasing cities share certain traits: ethnic and cultural variety, numerous microclimates that promote a diversity of vegetation, sufficient public transportation, Public art and freedom of expression in the community in the forms of sculpture, graffiti
and street art
, a range of build-out (or zoning) that creates both densely and sparsely populated areas, scenic neighboring geography (oceans or mountains), public spaces and events such as park
s and parade
s, musical variety through local radio or street musicians, and enforcement of laws that abate noise, crime, and pollution.
draw upon design elements such as axis, line, landform, horizontal and vertical planes, texture, and scale to create aesthetic variation within the landscape. They may additionally make use of aesthetic elements such as pools or fountains of water, plants, seasonal variance, stonework, fragrance, exterior lighting, statues, and lawns.
ers use a variety of techniques to allow people to express the truth about their unconscious minds by way of their clothing. To create wearable personality designers use fabric, cut, colour, scale, references to the past, texture, color harmony, distressing, transparency, insignia, accessories, beading and embroidery.
It is also used to find the average size of things, to make a product suitable for a high number of customers.
Film, television, and video
FilmFilm
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
combines many diverse disciplines, each of which may have their own rules of aesthetics. The aesthetics of cinematography
Cinematography
Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
are closely related to still photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
, but the movement of the subject(s), or the camera and the intensities, colors, and placement of the lighting
Lighting
Lighting or illumination is the deliberate application of light to achieve some practical or aesthetic effect. Lighting includes the use of both artificial light sources such as lamps and light fixtures, as well as natural illumination by capturing daylight...
are highly important. Sound recording, editing, and mixing are other, highly important areas of film, often closely related with the musical score. As in Theatre
Theatre
Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
, art direction, in the design of the sets and shooting locations also applies, as well as costume design
Costume design
Costume design is the fabrication of apparel for the overall appearance of a character or performer. This usually involves researching, designing and building the actual items from conception. Costumes may be for a theater or cinema performance but may not be limited to such...
and makeup. All of these disciplines are closely inter-twined and must be brought together by the aesthetic sensibilities of the director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
.
Montage, or editing is probably the one discipline unique to film, video, and television. The timing, rhythm and progression of shots form the ultimate composition of the film. This procedure is one of the most critical element of post production, and incorporates sound editing and mixing, as well as the design and execution of digital special effects.
In the case of a video installation
Video installation
Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has increased in popularity as digital video production...
, the method of presentation becomes critical. The work may be screened on a simple monitor
Video monitor
A video monitor also called a broadcast monitor, broadcast reference monitor or just reference monitor, is a display device similar to a television set, used to monitor the output of a video-generating device, such as playout from a video server, IRD, video camera, VCR, or DVD player. It may or...
, projected on a wall or other surface, or incorporated into a larger sculptural installation. A video installation may also involve sound, with similar considerations to be made based on speaker design and placement, volume, and tone.
Two-dimensional and plastic arts
Aesthetic considerations within the visual artsVisual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
are usually associated with the sense of vision
Visual perception
Visual perception is the ability to interpret information and surroundings from the effects of visible light reaching the eye. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision...
. A painting or sculpture, however, is also perceived spatially by recognized associations and context, and even to some extent by the senses of smell, hearing, and touch. The form of the work can be subject to an aesthetic as much as the content.
In painting, the aesthetic convention that we see a three-dimensional representation rather than a two-dimensional canvas is so well understood that most people do not realize that they are making an aesthetic interpretation. This notion is the basis of abstract impressionism
Abstract impressionism
Abstract Impressionism is a type of abstract painting where small brushstrokes build and structure large paintings...
.
In the United States during the postwar period, the "push-pull" theories of Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, positing a relation between color and perceived depth, strongly influenced a generation of prominent abstract painters, many of whom studied under Hofmann and were generally associated with abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. Hofmann's general attitude toward abstraction as virtually a moral imperative for the serious painter was also extremely influential.
Some aesthetic effects available in visual arts include variation, juxtaposition, repetition, field effects, symmetry/asymmetry, perceived mass, subliminal structure, linear dynamics, tension and repose, pattern, contrast, perspective, 3 dimensionality, movement, rhythm, unity/Gestalt, matrixiality and proportion.
Digital art
A new art form struggling for acceptance is digital artDigital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
, a by-product of computer programming that raises new questions about what truly constitutes art. Although paralleling many of the aesthetics in traditional media, digital art can additionally draw upon the aesthetic qualities of cross-media tactile relationships; interactivity; autonomous generativity; complexity and interdependence of relationships; suspense; and playfulness.
Artists working in this type of art are often forced to justify their use of a computer rather than a traditional medium, leading to, like the debate over Warhol's "Brillo Pad Boxes", a question of what constitutes art.
The criticisms of digital art are many. For example, graphics programs allow perfect shading to be achieved with little to no effort. In other types of programs, there is a sense that because of the variety of tools, filters, distortions, etc., that an artist has a veritable image factory at their disposal. The various criticisms ultimately come down to the issue of "what effort is the artist putting into their work?"
The 3d art community frequently references that while the programs they utilize render and shade the objects, their efforts are more akin to the sculptor or architect, presenting an aesthetically arranged, lighted, and textured scene. The users of the other programs such as Photoshop or Gimp point out that while they may have many tools at their disposal, the art itself must be that much more detailed and imaginative to stand out. In both cases there is the challenge of overcoming the barriers of limited technology and the lack of direct contact with one's medium.
Maps
Aesthetics in cartographyCartography
Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...
relates to the visual experience of map reading and can take two forms: responses to the map itself as an aesthetic object (e.g., through detail, colour, and form) and also the subject of the map symbolised, often the landscape (e.g., a particular expression of terrain which forms an imagined visual experience of the aesthetic).
Cartographers make aesthetic judgments when designing maps to ensure that the content forms a clear expression of the theme(s). Antique maps are perhaps especially revered due to their aesthetic value, which may seem to be derived from their styles of ornamentation. As such, aesthetics are often wrongly considered to be a by-product of design. If it is taken that aesthetic judgments are produced within a certain social context, they are fundamental to the cartographer's symbolisation and as such are integral to the function of maps.
Marketing
As opposed to Industrial Design, which focuses on the aesthetic qualities of consumer products (see below), the use of aesthetics in marketing concerns itself with the "trade dress" of a product, such as its branding, its commercial representation, or the reputation of its producer. Marketing professionals may tickle the consumer's aesthetic appreciation of sassyness, sophisticationSophistication
Sophistication is the quality of refinement — displaying good taste, wisdom and subtlety rather than crudeness, stupidity and vulgarity.In the perception of social class, sophistication can link with concepts such as status, privilege and superiority....
, color-harmony, stylishness, catchy jingles, slogans, craftsmanship, soothingness, attentiveness, authenticity, or the related perceived experiences associated with product consumption.
Marketing consists of intriguing the human mind to think in a direction where it would not have done so previously - or not without outside input. Human curiosity, self gain or mental adjustment is what drives marketing development itself.
Music
Some of the aesthetic elements expressed in musicMusic
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
include lyricism, harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, volume dynamics, resonance, playfulness, color, subtlety, elatedness, depth, and mood (see musical development
Musical development
In European classical music, musical development is a process by which a musical idea is communicated in the course of a composition. It refers to the transformation and restatement of initial material, and is often contrasted with musical variation, which is a slightly different means to the same...
). Aesthetics in music are often believed to be highly sensitive to their context: what sounds good in modern rock music
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
might sound terrible in the context of the early baroque
Baroque music
Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...
age.
Performing arts
Performing arts appeal to our aesthetics of storytelling, grace, balance, class, timing, strength, shock, humor, costume, irony, beauty, drama, suspense, and sensuality. Whereas live stage performance is usually constrained by the physical reality at hand, film performance can further add the aesthetic elements of large-scale action, fantasy, and a complex interwoven musical scoreFilm score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
. Performance art
Performance art
In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...
often consciously mixes the aesthetics of several forms. Role-playing games are sometimes seen as a performing art with an aesthetic structure of their own, called RPG theory
Role-playing game theory
A role-playing game theory is an academic or critical study of role-playing games as a social or artistic phenomenon. RPG theories seek to understand what role-playing games are, how it functions and how the process can be refined in order to improve the gaming experience and produce more useful...
.
Literature
In poetryPoetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...
, novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
s and non-fiction
Non-fiction
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...
, authors use a variety of techniques to appeal to our aesthetic values. Depending on the type of writing an author may employ rhythm, illustrations, structure, time shifting, juxtaposition, dualism, imagery, fantasy, suspense, analysis, humor/cynicism, and thinking aloud.
Gastronomy
Gastronomy
Gastronomy is the art or science of food eating. Also, it can be defined as the study of food and culture, with a particular focus on gourmet cuisine...
. Chefs inspire our aesthetic enjoyment through the visual sense using colour and arrangement; they inspire our senses of taste and smell using spices, diversity/contrast, anticipation, seduction, and decoration/garnishes. In regard to drinking water
Drinking water
Drinking water or potable water is water pure enough to be consumed or used with low risk of immediate or long term harm. In most developed countries, the water supplied to households, commerce and industry is all of drinking water standard, even though only a very small proportion is actually...
, there are formal criteria for aesthetic value including odour, colour, total dissolved solids
Total dissolved solids
Total Dissolved Solids is a measure of the combined content of all inorganic and organic substances contained in a liquid in: molecular, ionized or micro-granular suspended form. Generally the operational definition is that the solids must be small enough to survive filtration through a sieve...
and clarity. There are numerical standards in the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
for aesthetic acceptability of these parameters.
Note, however, a use of a word translated to "culinary" in Adorno's aesthetics. Adorno distinguishes between technically accurate and "beautiful" musical interpretation, and an interpretation higher which brings out the "truth" in the musical text: interpretations more rehearsed, with more time for rehearsal, but which might sound strange to audiences pandered-to by popular conductors (perhaps in the way Glenn Gould enstranges the music of Beethoven).
Unfortunately for the ordinary reader of Adorno, this isn't something technical such as "original instruments". It is instead the work of art that doesn't pander to what the audience "wants"...its whims.
This is linked to a Marxist interpretation which instead of treating the audience as an all-powerful "customer" adopts a teacherly or even priestly stance "above" the mere audience, something only the most "snobbish" of French chefs would dare, proposing to teach it to like Higher Things.
There are rarefied forms of *haute* cuisine; but note that common sense usually has a horselaugh about precious Yuppies eating designer food which it withholds about concert-goers listening to Berg; your man in the street merely thinks the latter crowd to be odd jobs, and doesn't resent them, meaning that ethical judgements play a role in aesthetic judgements that specialists in ethics, and specialists in aesthetics, systematically disregard...but which artists such as Tolstoy regarded as central.
Based on Adorno's theory of the (merely) culinary as not being "art", this would seem to mean that it is a joke, for an Adornoite (if such a person exists meaningfully), to treat cooking as an art form or eating as art appreciation.
Monty Python would often reverberate with this sort of arcana in a strange way: in the Mr. Creosote passage of The Meaning of Life, an enormously fat man is persuaded by the fawning waiter to have one more sweet whereupon Mr. Creosote throws up all over the dining room. Note that the scene has more claims to be art, despite being nauseating, than designer food.
This MAY be an unconscious comment on any theory of art that blindly equates "fine dining" and a visit to the picture galleries, a sort of tourist equation in which picture galleries are overrun in fact by post-prandial Mr. Creosotes. Even the ordinary man in the street would say that the starving artist visiting the gallery has a "better" apprehension of the higher, more inner, more elusive aura of the art work than Mr. Creosote, which means that for some authors, including Adorno, there is a nexus between ethics (which nearly tracks aesthetics polyphonically, where we use "good" and "bad" in ethics to characterise people and their deeds, and in aesthetics to judge what to buy).
The possibility of a rejection of the culinary in art starts with Kant's theory of the sublime but does not end there; post Holocaust (with its Nazis playing Bach: with Adorno's questions about poetry after Auschwitz) the culinary, and whether the German officer enjoying a "fine" meal has much of anything to do with art, become important aesthetic questions.
A Marxist theory of art would probably conclude that the chef cannot be an artist, lacking autonomy and beholden to the customer, Mr. Creosote, in all regards.
Humor
There is a developed theory of the aesthetics of jokes and humor, including a mathematical and logical analysis.Information technology
Aesthetics in information technologyInformation technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
has focused upon the study of human-computer interaction and creating user-friendly devices and software applications. Software itself has aesthetic dimensions ("software aesthetics"), as do information-technology-mediated processes and experiences such as computer video games and virtual reality
Virtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
simulations. Digital culture is a distinct aesthetic to judge the appeal of digital environments such as Web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s, website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
s, and icons, as well as visual and aural art produced exclusively with digital technologies. The notion of cyberspace
Cyberspace
Cyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...
has sometimes been linked to the concept of the sublime
Sublime (philosophy)
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...
.
Aesthetics in information technology do also apply to the act of designing software itself. Numerous programmers profess to experiencing a dimension of elegance
Elegance
Elegance is a synonym for beauty that has come to acquire the additional connotations of unusual effectiveness and simplicity. It is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness particularly in the areas of visual design, decoration, the sciences, and the esthetics of mathematics...
in the functionality and structuring of software at the source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
level. For example, a short, powerful expression that clearly expresses the intent of the code can be considered "beautiful" to the poor programmer charged with maintaining said code. This contrasts with code that is (as code all too often is) short, cryptic, unclear, and unnecessarily "clever". In-line documentation, while not strictly code, can be considered something a programmer would need to be good at in order to write beautiful code. Correctly done, documentation can accentuate the effect of beautiful code, when it is clear, concise, explains the intent of the programmer, and expands the understanding that one can gain by simply looking at the code. Comments that are redundant (only explain what the code already explains), cryptic, and overly long or short can detract from beautiful code. Aesthetics in programming can also have a practical level: Under the right conditions, elegant code can run faster and more efficiently, and (most importantly) be less prone to errors.
Critics of this would say that the need to justify "good design" by reference to "cost savings" mean that "good design" isn't "art" insofar as art is autonomous, and many aestheticians would have to say that art emerges in applications only in excess of cost savings. In information technology, theorists of "user friendliness" have to justify their "user friendly" applications and often disregard basic statistics when most users like a system, but a significant minority hate it.
That is, they may discard the standard deviation of their data in order to sell a good design for the best price, and this has nothing to do with art insofar as art is a useful signifier (if you cost-justify everything you are a businessman and not an artist).
A folk phenomenon among real programmers is in fact their frequent hatred of practice described in books as best practice and good design. A Marxist theory of industrial "art" would ascribe this to alienation, in which subaltern programmers never produce code they own in any meaningful sense, with the problem that the same sort of alienation, soldiering, and bloody-mindedness appeared, it seems, in Soviet computing shops.
The most sophisticated writings on the topic of aesthetics are to be found in the late Edsger Wybe Dijkstra's
Edsger Dijkstra
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra ; ) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000.Shortly before his...
corpus of papers and notes on computing: in Dijkstra, the art is real, but Ying with respect to the Yang of applications; Dijkstra seemed to have refused any analysis of programming as other than applied mathematics and, strange to say, never pursued what Adorno (the midcentury theoretician of whom Dijkstra was apparently unaware) called a purely culinary elegance...despite the protests of others that his work was "hard to digest", in Adorno's words not very culinary.
Dijkstra's beauty refused the notion of accessibility as do many "artistic" works ancient and modern: it was hard as is the Grosse Fuge, Beethoven's syncopated and neo-primitive late movement. In fact, no aesthetician makes "user friendliness" canonical and necessary in a work of art, strange to say in an era when supposedly the masses rule through the market; for most art theorists, it is nice if the canaille can enjoy some pretty rondo of Mozart and whistle it on the street, but would deny that this property must be shared by the Masonic prelude and fugue or the Requiem mass.
This makes strange any claim that a programmer making his work "user friendly" to all comers is some sort of artist by virtue of that. For Dijsktra, truth was primary, and beauty the automatic result.
Website Design
Recent research suggests that the visual aesthetics of computer interface is a strong determinant of users’ satisfaction and pleasure. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses found that users’ perceptions consist of different main dimensions. Lavie and Tractinsky found two main dimension which they termed “classical aesthetics” and “expressive aesthetics”.- Classical Aesthetics - pertains to aesthetic notions that presided from antiquity until the 18th century. These notions emphasize orderly and clear design and are closely related to many of the design rules advocated by usability experts.
- Expressive Aesthetics - created by the designers’ creativity and originality and by the ability to break design conventions.
While both dimensions of perceived aesthetic are drawn from a pool of aesthetic judgments, they are clearly distinguishable from each other.
In a recent study Moshagen and Thielsch found four core dimensions of website aesthetics:
- Simplicity
- Diversity
- Colors
- Craftsmanship
Simplicity and diversity have repeatedly been treated as formal parameters of aesthetic objects throughout the history of empirical aesthetics. Colors are a very critical property of aesthetic objects. Craftsmanship addresses the skillful and coherent integration of the relevant design dimensions. While simplicity is highly correlated to classical aesthetics as mentioned by Lavie and Tractinsky, the other three factors could be treated as deeper differentiation of expressive aesthetics.
Best practices for aesthetic Website Design
• Create visual clues based on groupings; related items or links are grouped together while unrelated items are separated.
• Use headings and subheadings to allow visual scanning of content.
• Use headings, subheadings, font sizes, bold fonts and italic fonts in proportion to the importance of the item.
• Align elements on a page so that they are all visually connected; size all elements on the page to create balance and unity; nothing should look out of place unless you have a specific reason for the effect.
• Choose a font style that supports the site atmosphere and stick to it; limit styles to 2 at the most.
• Use images and photos for visual appeal and to communicate ideas.
• Use one set of design elements across your website.
Website Design Aesthetics and Credibility
Website design influences user’s perception of site credibility. One of the factors that influences whether users stay or go on a web page is the page aesthetics. Another reason may involve a user's judgment about the site's credibility. Findings indicate that when the same content is presented using different levels of aesthetic treatment, the content with a higher aesthetic treatment was judged as having higher credibility. We call this the amelioration effect of visual design and aesthetics on content credibility. Holmes suggests that this effect is operational within the first few seconds in which a user views a web page. Given the same content, a higher aesthetic treatment will increase perceived credibility.
Mathematics
The aesthetics of mathematicsMathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
are often compared with music and poetry. Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős
Paul Erdos
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory...
expressed his views on the indescribable beauty of mathematics when he said "Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven)
The Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, is the final complete symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven. Completed in 1824, the symphony is one of the best known works of the Western classical repertoire, and has been adapted for use as the European Anthem...
beautiful." Math appeals to the "senses" of logic, order, novelty, elegance, and discovery. Some concepts in math with specific aesthetic application include sacred ratios in geometry
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
, the intuitiveness of axioms, the complexity and intrigue of fractals, the solidness and regularity of polyhedra, and the serendipity
Serendipity
Serendipity means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise"; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, due to its...
of relating theorems across disciplines. There is a developed aesthetic and theory of humor in mathematical humor.
Neuroesthetics
Cognitive scienceCognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
has also considered aesthetics, with the advent of neuroesthetics
Neuroesthetics
Neuroesthetics is a relatively recent sub-discipline of empirical aesthetics. Empirical aesthetics takes a scientific approach to the study of aesthetic perceptions of art and music. Neuroesthetics received its formal definition in 2002 as the scientific study of the neural bases for the...
, pioneered by Semir Zeki
Semir Zeki
Semir Zeki is a professor of neuroesthetics at University College London. His main interest is the organization of the primate visual brain. He published his first scientific paper in 1967...
, which seeks to explain the prominence of great art as an embodiment of biological principles of the brain, namely that great works of art capture the essence of things just as vision and the brain capture the essentials of the world from the ever-changing stream of sensory input. See also Vogelkop Bowerbird
Vogelkop Bowerbird
The Vogelkop Bowerbird , also known as the Vogelkop Gardener Bowerbird, is a medium-sized, bowerbird of the mountains of the Vogelkop Peninsula at Western New Guinea, Indonesia.-Description:...
.
Industrial design
Industrial DesignIndustrial design
Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...
: Designers need many aesthetic qualities to improve the marketability of manufactured products: smoothness, shininess/reflectivity, texture, pattern, curviness, color, simplicity, usability, velocity, symmetry, naturalness, and modernism.
The staff of the Design Aesthetics section focuses on design, appearance and the way people perceive products. Design aesthetics is interested in the appearance of products; the explanation and meaning of this appearance is studied mainly in terms of social and cultural factors. The distinctive focus of the section is research and education in the field of sensory modalities in relation to product design. These fields of attention generate design baggage that enables engineers to design products, systems, and services, and match them to the correct field of use.
Architecture and interior design
Although structural integrity, cost, the nature of building materials, and the functional utility of the building contribute heavily to the design process, architects can still apply aesthetic considerations to buildings and related architecturalArchitecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
structures. Common aesthetic design principles include ornamentation, edge delineation, texture, flow, solemnity, symmetry, color, granularity, the interaction of sunlight and shadows, transcendence, and harmony.
Interior design
Interior design
Interior design describes a group of various yet related projects that involve turning an interior space into an effective setting for the range of human activities are to take place there. An interior designer is someone who conducts such projects...
ers, being less constrained by structural concerns, have a wider variety of applications to appeal to aesthetics. They may employ color, color harmony, wallpaper, ornamentation, furnishings, fabrics, textures, lighting, various floor treatments, as well as adhere to aesthetic concepts such as feng shui
Feng shui
Feng shui ' is a Chinese system of geomancy believed to use the laws of both Heaven and Earth to help one improve life by receiving positive qi. The original designation for the discipline is Kan Yu ....
.
Urban life
Urban planning
Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....
and achieving urban aesthetics (beautification
Beautification
Beautification is the process of making visual improvements to a person, place or thing. With regard to a town, city or to an urban area, this most often involves planting trees, shrubbery, and other greenery, but frequently also includes adding decorative or historic-style street lights and other...
) involves a good deal of historical luck, happenstance, and indirect gestalt. Nevertheless, aesthetically pleasing cities share certain traits: ethnic and cultural variety, numerous microclimates that promote a diversity of vegetation, sufficient public transportation, Public art and freedom of expression in the community in the forms of sculpture, graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
and street art
Street art
Street art is any art developed in public spaces — that is, "in the streets" — though the term usually refers to unsanctioned art, as opposed to government sponsored initiatives...
, a range of build-out (or zoning) that creates both densely and sparsely populated areas, scenic neighboring geography (oceans or mountains), public spaces and events such as park
Park
A park is a protected area, in its natural or semi-natural state, or planted, and set aside for human recreation and enjoyment, or for the protection of wildlife or natural habitats. It may consist of rocks, soil, water, flora and fauna and grass areas. Many parks are legally protected by...
s and parade
Parade
A parade is a procession of people, usually organized along a street, often in costume, and often accompanied by marching bands, floats or sometimes large balloons. Parades are held for a wide range of reasons, but are usually celebrations of some kind...
s, musical variety through local radio or street musicians, and enforcement of laws that abate noise, crime, and pollution.
Landscape design
Landscape designersLandscape architecture
Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor and public spaces to achieve environmental, socio-behavioral, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and geological conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions...
draw upon design elements such as axis, line, landform, horizontal and vertical planes, texture, and scale to create aesthetic variation within the landscape. They may additionally make use of aesthetic elements such as pools or fountains of water, plants, seasonal variance, stonework, fragrance, exterior lighting, statues, and lawns.
Fashion design
Fashion designFashion design
Fashion design is the art of the application of design and aesthetics or natural beauty to clothing and accessories. Fashion design is influenced by cultural and social latitudes, and has varied over time and place. Fashion designers work in a number of ways in designing clothing and accessories....
ers use a variety of techniques to allow people to express the truth about their unconscious minds by way of their clothing. To create wearable personality designers use fabric, cut, colour, scale, references to the past, texture, color harmony, distressing, transparency, insignia, accessories, beading and embroidery.
It is also used to find the average size of things, to make a product suitable for a high number of customers.
Visual arts
Music
Architecture
- Lee/Stroik: Christian Architecture
- Salingaros: Life and Complexity in Architecture
- Ciudades del anonimato; Architecture