Sold · 10
$96
FUNCTION · 2023
- Jo2
- Pc2
- Ae
Angels In the Outfield
Aesthetic pleasure supports from below: gentle radiance and purity offered as pure form, beautiful before it means anything.
Aesthetic Pleasure
The Regarded
EXTREME
RARE
HIGH-MID · Liminal
The response to arrangement itself. Proportion, interval, colour relation, with no story attached and nothing being claimed. Aesthetic pleasure is the part of looking that survives after the subject has been identified and set aside.
The word
From the Greek aisthesis, sense perception, the same root that gives anaesthetic, without sensation. The philosopher Alexander Baumgarten pressed the word into service in the eighteenth century for a science of sensory knowledge, and Kant fixed beauty at its centre. The word remembers what the feeling is: perception itself, enjoyed.
The feeling
A quiet click of rightness in front of arrangement: interval, proportion, one colour against another. It asks for nothing; nothing is desired, envied or mourned, which gives the state its unusual cleanness. Attention rests on the surface without needing to pass through it to a story. It ends without loss when the looking ends.
Against its neighbours
Admiration credits a maker and ranks an achievement; aesthetic pleasure needs no author at all, and works on driftwood as well as on paintings. Entrancement will not let the eye go; aesthetic pleasure lets go easily, which is exactly why it can be revisited without cost.
In the work
Composition placed above subject. The piece reads as an arrangement first, and whatever it depicts arrives second.
1 work composed with Aesthetic Pleasure
Sold · 10