Aesthetic norms and social norms in art

Aesthetics as a science is a subdivision of philosophy, which studies the nature of art and our attitude towards it. It originated in the 18th century in Europe and developed mainly in England, studying such fields as poetry, sculpture, music and dances. Then the art was classified into one section, calling it Les Beaux Arts or fine arts.

Philosophers argued that such a concept as "aesthetic norms" in itself can not explain beauty. Naturally, beauty can have such rational properties as order, symmetry and proportion, but at least the concept of "art" is not normalized. People of art create intuitively, working with human feelings, experiences and emotions, without thinking about such a concept as aesthetic norms.

Aesthetic experience can include a mixture of different feelings, such as pleasure, anger, grief, suffering and joy. Emmanuel Kant described art as an area that prefers the form of a function. Beauty, he said, depended on a particular figure, with which it was directly related. So, for example, a horse can be beautiful no matter how well it runs.

Our judgments have long shifted from medieval principles to the so-called "Age of Enlightenment" and, accordingly, to the idea that human intuition can be regarded as a source of knowledge.

However, to some extent our understanding of the beautiful is often not as individual as it seems at first glance, but is interconnected with public opinion. Although the role of the individual in relation to art should not be discounted.

These two theories - personal perception and public recognition - are not mutually exclusive, but, on the contrary, interact and emanate from each other. In other words, aesthetic norms are formed in one way or another by society and, thus, are some kind of social norms. This conclusion can be drawn from the very definition of the concept.

Philosophers argue that the social norm is A group or social concept of how an individual should behave in a particular context. That is, it is the society that determines the behavior that is most expected. Sociologists, along with psychologists, study how "unwritten laws" of society determine not only our behavior, but also the attitude to certain things - the worldview. Strange as it may seem, social norms influence our preferences, which by definition we consider to be purely individual.

For example, musical preferences, belonging to a political movement or a favorite writer, of course, can differ from those that are the elected majority. But modern critics come to this conclusion: if a work has at least one admirer, then it has the right to exist and be called a work of art, regardless of the opinion of the majority.

Thanks to this situation, new directions have appeared in contemporary art. These should be called fashionable now among the young people rap and rock in music, modernism and impressionism in the visual arts, etc.

However, some "artists" in the pursuit of originality create such trends in art that go against the established concepts of aesthetics, beauty and acceptability. For example, everything related to excrement, acting either as a "ready subject of a work of art" or as a material for its production, can not be considered beautiful. And this direction is considered to be contrary to the aesthetic norms recognized by modern man.

Social norms determine whether an individual is in a group or outside it. The main question is whether certain aesthetic norms are created by an exceptional leader or are formed over the course of time under the influence of the whole society.