originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Can anyone offer a definition of "art" that categorically excludes wine under all circumstances but includes the entire menagerie of what's been passed off as art over the last few decades?
I don't see any need to get into the argument about whether wine is art since it is immaterial here. But arguments that have done what Keith wants have been offered in England by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Ruskin and Pater. The term, aesthetics was invented by Baumgarten precisely to demarcate the field from that which give pleasure through the senses as opposed to that whose pleasure, though communicated through the senses was intelligible. Kant explicitly excludes the taste in at least Canary Wine from the aesthetic. Hegel explicitly denied that aesthetic beauty could come through what he called the appetitive tastes. And on and on and on.
As to what has been passed of as art in the last few decades, precisely because their conceptual basis, differentiating them from art that makes any appeal to the sensually pleasing or striking (assuming you are thinking of Duchamps and followers, and not abstraction)forces aesthetic criteria that would force them to depart even further from definitions of aesthetic beauty that would capture wine. Thus Benjamin, Adorno, Peter Berger and others get added to the list.
You are free to disagree with any and all of these theorists, of course. I was just answering the question you asked.
