(February 27, 2019 at 1:03 am)zainab Wrote: Do we have an innate univeersal "LAWS" of aesthetics?
And if "YES".... Do we share it with other species?
Can it be a coincidence that we find birds and butterflies attractive even though they evolved to appeal to other birds and butterflies, not to us?
Lets TALK
Fascinating question!
You know, probably, that after Newton discovered the universal abstract laws by which gravity worked, a number of Enlightenment figures tried hard to do the same for aesthetic issues. Joshua Reynolds in England and Claude Lebrun in France (for painting) and Rameau (for music) thought they could reveal these underlying and unchanging laws.
And if such laws could be discovered and articulated, it meant they could be taught. (This was largely based on educational theory that followed Locke's idea of the tabula rasa. It was assumed that everything we are has been learned since birth.) That's why this was the era when the Royal Academy of Art and the Ecole des Beaux Arts were founded. If the laws could be discovered and taught, it meant that eventually little Michelangelos could be made, not born. Whereas the bestowal of genius was earlier seen as a gift from God, rule-based aesthetics would allow any good student to master them.
Unfortunately, we know how that all turned out. By the end of the 19th century the academies had stagnated. They declared Meissonier and Bouguereau (largely forgotten today) to be the equals of Rembrandt, and rejected the Impressionists. History has not been kind to them.
Still, that doesn't mean that such rules don't exist. Only that the academies got them wrong. So it's still something to be pondered.
I don't know what the rules might be, but I think we'd have to start in a pretty general way. Nothing specific, like "blond hair good, black hair bad."
Maybe something like "variety within uniformity"? Or "sufficient surprise-value to enliven the familiar"?
