About
Currently Esthete.org contains : 8 artists, 31 artworks, 7 aesthetic judgements.
Today we see that the contemporary artist implements new techniques, works with new media and offers new places of exhibition. During the 20th century, the artistic transformation has resulted in an immense variety of aesthetic experiences devoid of coherence and order. If at the time of the fine art we could unify these experiences by an idea of the pure art of cultural hegemony, nowadays we face a different interpretation of art and the absence of any criterion of art evaluation.
In this respect, art needs a principle or rule that would give meaning to the notions of aesthetic experience. It is a question of rethinking the evaluation criteria and even the judgment of taste to frame this aesthetic plurality in a conceptually organized way. One of the forms of possible reaction to this immense diversity of objects and judgments is to redefine the field of art using an artistic canon. It is about the argument of authority that arises from the consensus of a milieu or transcendental approach in the Kantian sense that predefines a field of aesthetic experience. We can, for example, give a canonical status to paintings of a particular artist and evaluate other works of art by referring to this canon. Yet this rather naïve and neo-dogmatic strategy is not feasible in the era of postmodern pluralism where everyone expresses his or her preferences. It is difficult to imagine how all diverse cultures accept the standard of judgment of taste from a particular artwork. Moreover, even if one could subordinate all artistic practices under the same scale of appreciation, this approach would mean the cancellation of the diversity of works of art in the name of an absolute field of aesthetics. The artistic dogmatism can save us from the disarray of the aesthetic experience, but necessarily through the abandon of the majority of artistic practices that do not share any criterion with the canon. The return to the old idealistic aesthetic theories seems impossible. We must try to form a new paradigm of aesthetics that responds to the organization of liberal culture with its diversity and relativity.
The second way that Esthete.org pursues consists in finding in the diversity of artistic practices similar and related elements to escape a disorder of the aesthetic experience. This position must correspond to the universal nature of the aesthetic experience. It is not about a pretension to universality, but about universality of the judgment in the Humean sense, which is anthropologically secure for all persons. The unification of art must therefore reflect the fact that every human has similar aesthetic experience under certain conditions: the absence of prejudice, the versatile point of view, the skill of discerning descriptive qualities in each artistic practice etc. It is where a refined taste in art comes from, acquired by a broad aesthetic experience and a learning of the artistic grammar. The proposed theory must take into account the fact that one is able to classify artworks according to specific traits or criteria. In this case, one can define the superiority of an artwork compared to another in the same classification. It follows that a relativity of the appreciations of the artworks depends on an intention of the viewer to judge an artwork according to one or the other quality. These kinds of relativities are articulated and intersected on the condition that the viewers join the same mode of apprehension. Here the mission of Esthete.org is to create this new paradigm of art for the search of similarity of aesthetic values in different language games like styles, groups, movements etc. Judging art will therefore consist in discerning these local values and classifying them conceptually in more global rating scales, bringing to unity all the diversity of aesthetic experiences. Finally, this approach will contribute to understanding artworks more easily through the variety of aesthetic appreciations and will allow us to enjoy art more than ever.
Join Esthete.org and develop your taste in art.
Ivan Podornikov,
M.A. in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
Sorbonne University
Thesis: Criteria of an aesthetic judgement of contemporary art