Ventignua

"Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.” – Keith Haring

Various theories have been advanced over the years – pleasure, beauty, expression, or the stimulation of emotion – but, as the philosopher Gordon Graham writes, “none of them can on its own explain the special value of great art.” (Philosophy of the Arts, 52.) So what does Graham propose? That art is valuable as a source of knowledge and understanding.

According to Christoph Baumberger:

We praise certain artworks for their profundity and subtlety, for the insights they provide or for how they make us see the world anew and we think these features are artistically relevant. We criticize other works for their shallowness, superficiality or sentimentality and think them thus artistically flawed. These are artistic evaluations that seem also to be, or to depend on, cognitive evaluations. Aesthetic cognitivism takes such features of our evaluations of artworks seriously. It is best thought of as a conjunction of an epistemic and an aesthetic claim: (1) Epistemic claim: Artworks have cognitive functions. (2) Aesthetic claim: Cognitive functions of artworks partly determine their artistic value. (“Art and Understanding: In Defence of Aesthetic Cognitivism,” 1.)🎨🖌️🖼️

Zaghdoudi ✨