Aesthetics

Skepticism in Aesthetics

In previous chapters, we discussed epistemology, ethics, and politics.

Traditional aesthetics comprises the traditional studies of the fol­lowing question: What kinds of aesthetic judgments are valid - that is, certain or at least plausible? This question arises because people argue about aesthetics, and such arguments imply that there are aesthetical criteria, explicit or not, and that they are open to discussion. Hence, then, beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder.

Although in full agreement that beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, we endorse the skeptical response to the traditional aesthetic question: no aesthetic judgment is certain or plausible.

Aesthetic discussions regarding the rational basis of aesthetic knowl­edge are quite analogous to those in epistemology, ethics, and politics. The idea is popular that skepticism in all of these fields yields as corol­laries some absurd statements. In aesthetics, these statements are still analogous to the traditional objections to skepticism elsewhere, but slightly less so, in that they are slightly less prevalent in aesthetics than elsewhere.

The arguments against skepticism in aesthetics rest on the view that it yields the following absurd consequences:

ι. There are no aesthetic rules; aesthetic nihilism is true.

2.  Rational settlement of aesthetic disagreements is impossible.

3.      The aestheticjudgments of art critics, museum curators, archi­tects, and so forth are not superior to the aesthetic judgments of the aesthetically ignorant.

Let us consider these assertions and show that they are not corollar­ies of skepticism, thereby diffusing the traditional objections thereto.

The first of these objections to aesthetic skepticism is the claim that it implies nihilism. This objection rests on the following false claim: if no aesthetic judgment is certain or plausible, then no aesthetic judgment is true or right. This is a confusion of truth and certainty (or plausibility).

1.  No aesthetical judgment is certain or plausible.

Nevertheless,

2.  Some aesthetic judgments are right, correct, happy, and so on.

To see that a doubtful aesthetic judgment can be right, consider genuine aesthetic disagreement among serious, reasonable, fairly knowledgeable individuals, like those that occur regularly among cura­tors or art critics. Such disagreements easily turn up whenever a new fashion appears. They are often rational. In such cases, each of the conflicting possible judgments is reasonable and doubtful; still, as the dissenting parties reject each other’s view, at most only one of them is right.

The second of these traditional objections to aesthetic skepticism rests on the view that it blocks all rational resolution of aesthetic dis­agreements. The skeptical answer to this is the same as its answer to the parallel objection in epistemology, ethics, and politics: the objection rests on the assumption that aesthetic judgments are due to choice alone, but they are not. Our aesthetic judgments are largely deter­mined by psychological factors. This raises the question: What are these psychological factors? We address this question shortly.

The third of these traditional objections to skepticism is that it leads to the absurd conclusion that aesthetic judgments of art critics, museum curators, architects, and so forth are not superior to the aes­thetic judgments of the ignorant. If no aesthetic judgment is certain or at least plausible, then there is no justification for these expertjudg­ments and, therefore, they should not decide which painting should be hung in the museum or which buildings should be constructed.

This objection to aesthetic skepticism is analogous to the similar objection to epistemological skepticism.

Aesthetics and Beauty

Until the eighteenth century, philosophical discussions of aesthetics employed the words beauty, beautiful, and their cognates. They were concerned with criteria for the beauty of beautiful objects (including beautiful people). Nowadays, they mostly avoid this kind of locution in preference for the word aesthetic (or aesthetic quality and the like). Presumably, the word aesthetic has a technical meaning.

The main problem with the concept of the aesthetic is that it blocks rational discussion. Because we do not have strong intuition regard­ing the proper use of the concept of the aesthetic, we cannot refer to such intuition to criticize any thesis about aesthetic qualities. We have no objection to the use of the term aesthetic as identical to the term beauty, and we often follow suit because the latter term is in gen­eral use and, generally, people have stronger intuition about what is and is not beautiful than about what is and is not aesthetic. Still, it is largely agreed that there is a difference between the beautiful and the aesthetic. Some natural scenes or events or people or animals and their performances (e.g., the elegant swift movement of a tiger) are beautiful even though they are scarcely works of art. Some art is great and moves us deeply but is not beautiful (and is not meant to be), and some art is renowned for its beauty but not judged aesthetically as very impressive. We recognize works of art that are not beautiful to have aesthetic value. The classical examples are the famous paint­ings by Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Breughel the Elder. In modern times, this phenomenon is much more common; at least, protest art is a familiar sort of intentionally unbeautiful products that are gen­erally deemed valuable, not only for their social or political messages (because not all of them are considered to have aesthetic value). We return to this point shortly.

Toward a Psychological Theory of Beauty

When discussing the second traditional objection to skepticism in aes­thetics, we claimed that our aesthetical judgments are largely deter­mined by psychological factors.

Many philosophers discussed the meaning of the concept of beauty. Kant, for example, claimed that beauty is disinterested pleasure; that is, what we judge beautiful is what we enjoy while having no practical interest in it. Whether this is true has been subject to endless debate. The debate is not relevant to the present discussion about the psycho­logical conditions conducive to that judgment because Kant did not suggest any.^[62]

Evolutionary psychologists claim that our aesthetical preference is explicable as contributing to survival. They declare beauty to have been initially sexual attraction: attraction to beautiful members of the opposite sex, they say, is due to their being healthy and suitable for pro­creation. For example, a nonsymmetrical appearance is unattractive because it may be due to a deformity caused by sickness. Also, women find muscular men attractive and beautiful (or handsome, to use sex­ist terminology) and this, of course, helps the survival of offspring in two ways (i.e., reproductively and protectively). Men may find women with flat bellies attractive because the opposite may indicate that they are pregnant. Yet, there is a limit to this: local tastes vary as to whether thin or fat women or fragile or sturdy women are the more attractive; so, obviously, such explanations are limited.^[63] Nonetheless, they hold at most in relation to the beauty of humans and need not be relevant to other aesthetic judgments, such as those about beautiful landscapes or wild animals or paintings.

Ancient philosophers offered two principles of beauty: symmetry and harmony. But, it is obvious that not every symmetrical object is beautiful (e.g., a simple office building might be symmetrical and bor­ing, even ugly), and not every beautiful object is symmetrical (most paintings are not).^[64] The same applies to harmony. We do not quite know what is harmonious (the word is very inexact, in both its original Greek and contemporary usage). Not every object that we judge to be harmonious do we also judge beautiful (e.g., we often judge exces­sive harmony not beautiful, perhaps because we judge it maudlin or kitschy), and not every beautiful object is noted for its harmony unless the concept of harmony becomes so broad that it renders the thesis trivial. Several scholars have claimed that we judge an object beautiful when its proportions meet with the golden section^[65] or another sim­ple ratio. This cannot be true because the golden section and simple ratios are rare when applied with precision and ubiquitous otherwise because they can then be found in almost any piece of furniture - although it is obvious that not all of them are beautiful.

We propose the following psychological fragmentary and tentative theory: what we judge beautiful has a form that (ι) is unexpected, (2) is ordered (i.e., not chaotic or accidental), and (3) does not appear as the outcome of some ill-fated event.

Let us offer some examples. Noble metals are considered somewhat more beautiful than base ones; indeed, their colors are infrequent and, as such, rather unexpected. Polished bronze is appealing, too, although somewhat less so. Similarly, flowers that have unusual colors or shapes are considered more beautiful than common growth, unless their color or shape indicates damage or sickness. For example, very large flowers (e.g., lilacs) are rare and are considered beautiful. On the other hand, cold weather in the middle of the summer is unexpected but not judged as beautiful because it is explained as an accidental phenomenon.

Works of art are judged beautiful only on the tacit assumption that they are not easy to produce. In this sense, they are unexpected. For example, efforts to decry modern abstract paintings often appeared as good imitations of them drawn by accident, by children, and by monkeys in the zoo. The assumption that drawing reliable images is not easy causes the tendency to judge such drawings beautiful. So does the assumption that it is quite difficult to string into poems some suggestive words in rhythm and rhyme; it causes the tendency to judge such poems as beautiful. When George Bernard Shawwanted to decry drama in blank verse, he tried to show how easily composed it is.^[66] Similarly, photographs are deemed non-art because they are easy to produce. The answer to this criticism is that the items selected for exhibition are a very small portion of a set from which they were selected and just because of their rare virtue. Indeed, both writing and photography are easy to do but difficult to do well.

One may expect here similar criticism from the chaos theory: some fractals are beautiful. Now, most fractals are chaotic and not judged beautiful. The suggestion that all fractals are chaotic is mere semantics. Some are very simply ordered and are seen that way; such fractals are rare and may be beautiful.

As these examples suggest, when judging art, we consider some targets that the pieces of art should meet (e.g., good likeness, rhymes) and assume that meeting these targets is not too easy a task. This makes the works of art that meet them rather unexpected. However, it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the question of how these targets are determined.

We discussed unexpectedness in Chapter 3, in which we claimed that people endorse new beliefs in order to reduce the unexpectedness of the world. Here, we add that people enjoy viewing unexpected phenomena as long as they are not the outcome of ill-fated events. When there is no risk, we enjoy the challenge of the unexpected for the alleviation of boredom. We return to this issue shortly.

The Evolution of Art

Art has its transient fashions. As Gombrich stated, the history of art is explicable as a process of problem solving. Consider the history of painting: much of it is explicable as a series of methods to present the three-dimensional world in which we live on two-dimensional walls, carpets, canvases, or paper. Each solution that was invented through the history of painting was intriguing; as such, each meets the con­dition of unexpectedness. However, after some time, the solution became familiar, and then its application became more expected, and then a new unexpected solution was sought, perhaps after the prob­lem deepened. Then, to find new solutions, newer problems were sought, usually those akin to the older solutions. For example, at the beginning of the Renaissance, the use of the principles of perspec­tives was intriguing and considered to be art. But, when the theory of perspectives became familiar, drawing a picture according to the rules of perspectives turned out to be a rather technical mission, and thereby not sufficiently challenging, not art proper. A new problem then appeared and it had to do with lighting: How can light and shade help entrench the sense of perspective and render a painting real? Paintings with obvious sources of light were depicted, and the light and shaded parts followed the rules of optics. This led to diverse variations, such as a painting of the baby Christ as the source of light, or strongly colored parts of a painting that enhance its composition, or, alternatively, paintings of interiors with soft light. All this, however, does not explain how some artists used these techniques to create great masterpieces that stand far above the rest of their kind.

Non-Beautiful Art

Our fragmentary and tentative theory explains why we judge as artful some non-beautiful exhibits. Placing them in museums is unexpected and so meets our condition of unexpectedness. For example, a urinal is not expected to be in a museum. The urinal itself is not beautiful, but the action of placing it in a museum (as a creation of Duchamp) was unexpected, not accidental, and not the outcome of an ill-fated event; as such, it had an aesthetical value like that of beautiful exhibits. Of course, it was not much of a surprise and the little surprise value that it had soon wore off. Therefore, we call it a gimmick and do not ascribe to it much aesthetic value. This raises the question: When does getting used to an idea reduce its aesthetic value and when not? For one thing, because repeated experiences of a gimmick wear it out, we call it a gimmick and forget it. But this is not the whole answer; we return to this discussion later.

Beauty and Pleasure

Most aestheticians agree that seeing beautiful objects or people is pleasing. Why? The answer to this question is beyond the scope of this book. A viable hypothesis is that we enjoy reviewing interesting phe­nomena, and the interesting is unexpected. The pleasure of viewing the beautiful, therefore, is like the pleasure of reviewing interesting phenomena (but not the other way around). In both cases, we enjoy revealing the unexpected.

To see this, let us compare viewing the beautiful bodies of members of the opposite sex and understanding a beautiful theorem in math­ematics or a scientific discovery. Viewing beautiful bodies is attractive and, indeed, when we call them attractive we usually mean it both sex­ually and aesthetically. Yet, from the aesthetic viewpoint, Rembrandt’s painting of coarse Hendrickje is much superior to his earlier painting of his Iovelywife, Saskia. This is an example of the divergence between sexual and aesthetic attraction, which agrees with our fragmentary and tentative theory but clashes violently with the evolutionist explanation of beauty. This is hardly avoidable because most adaptations outlast their original survival value with unexpected results.

There is a famous sinister aspect to the aesthetic experience and one that makes many individuals hate art. It is the demand that educators make of their charges. It is bad enough to demand that students learn their lessons; the additional demand that they like the lessons is much worse. The conflict between the dislike of compulsory art and the pleasure of its enjoyment is intolerable. At times, this is the result of our educational system; at times, however, it is the outcome of dogmatic adherence to some arcane aesthetic theory, such as the idea that beauty is linked to the golden section. It is difficult to know how close an accepted proportion should be to the magical number ι.666, and it is amazing how much conviction the Pythagorean theory of small proportion has, especially in music. A priori, it is impossible for the same theory to hold for both diatonic scales and their series of modifications up to the well-tempered scale and beyond. As aesthetics, this theory is pathetic; as psychology of aesthetics, it is naturalistic, so the very possibility of stylistic variation refutes it, and these variations abound.^[67]

A way out of this refutation is to postulate that of every two vari­ants, one is more beautiful than the other. But this postulate is pre­posterous. The fragmentary psychological theory advocated here, by contrast, makes it amply obvious that a change of style may be wel­come even if it turns out to be of little lasting aesthetic value. Indeed, all artistic changes are such that their novelty assures success as long as it is not taken as chaotic, unlike its lasting aesthetic value: this is open to the successful inventiveness of the artists who use it. (The invented technique should be used in ways that keep it fresh.) This is why so often innovation meets with public hostility that turns into public enthusiasm that then fades into indifference; indifference is the ultimate destination of most works of art on their way to oblivion.

Tragedy

Many aestheticians, from Aristotle to date, found surprising the enjoy­ment of watching tragedies: because tragedies are sad, why do people enjoy watching them? Aristotle suggested the catharsis theory: we enjoy not the sad story but the experience of having watched it; we like to watch tragedies in order to have our funds of emotions purified by having them exhausted. Freud suggested a similar theory.

Our fragmentary and tentative theory explains better and in a sim­pler manner the possibility ofjudging some tragedies as beautiful. We do not expect stories to excite us because we know that they are unreal, products of the imagination. Therefore, when we watch a tragedy that does excite us, it catches us by surprise,^[68] it meets the condition of unex­pectedness (as well as the other conditions), and, as a result, we enjoy it and then we may - and at times do - judge it to be beautiful. This raises again the question: How, then, do we enjoy repeatedly watch­ing a tragedy? Why do some but not all tragedies - or any other type of art, for that matter - weather repetitions and even win increased appreciation? We now come to this discussion.

Repetitions (ι)

On the face of it, our fragmentary and tentative theory is in plain conflict with the empirical observation that we enjoy the repeated experience of the same aesthetic event, whether reading a poem, watching a drama, or visiting the same museum to see the same mas­terpieces. Because in these repeating visits we are familiar with these aesthetic events, they are not unexpected. How, then, can we judge them beautiful?

Our answer to this objection is that the beautiful works of art are unexpected because they are rare achievements, and this kind of unexpectedness does not change by repeated visits. A painting that dis­plays an expressive face is unexpected relative to our expectations of what can be (easily) drawn, and this unexpectedness is not decreased by re-watching. Likewise, a drama that keeps us excited each time we watch it is unexpected relative to our expectations of being excited by an unreal story. The question about why a certain drama excited us is beyond the scope of this study. However, the fact that we are excited when re-watching a drama is not more surprising than the fact that we get excited by watching it the first time because we already know that the story is not real.

This is not the whole story, of course. Different people enjoy rep­etitions for different reasons. Some do so to avoid the challenge of novelty. Others find repetitions worthwhile in finding in it new lay­ers overlooked at first, especially if the work in question is new and challenging. Also, the repetition may serve different roles. William Somerset Maugham, the famous English storyteller, reported that he usually read a good story at least twice, the first time to enjoy it and the second time to see how it was put together. Our own part of the discussion is trite by comparison: we observe that, if the repetition is boring, we tend to dismiss the work of art as minor. Thus, if one can sum up the surprise of the detective novel by the justly famous punch­line “the butler did it,” then reading it a second time is impossible (unless the first time is flatly forgotten). The most prestigious detec­tive novel is Dostoevsky’s justly famous Crime and Punishment, which begins by telling the reader all that there is to know about the crime. The challenge for the author that keeps the reader glued to the page is to show how the detective forces a confession out of the criminal. Moreover, the author’s intent was to combat moral nihilism, and the challenge is in the question: Howwell did he manage to do that? Also, here is an intriguing and important question: Is the book’s aesthetic value dependent on the moral aspect of its story? We choose to skip this item.

Repetitions (2)

On the face of it, our fragmentary and tentative theory is also in plain conflict with yet another empirical observation related to repetitions. Many pieces of art include repetitive elements. For example, strings of beads and decorations on carpets or buildings, as well as musical works, include repetitive components. Because these elements are repetitions, they are not unexpected; yet, some repetitive works are judged to be beautiful.

Our answer to this objection is that it is not the components that are unexpected but rather the patterns that they display. Indeed, rep­etition is the means by which a pattern is displayed, whether in a building, a symphony, a carpet, or a necklace. We observe these items in search of patterns in them, and we judge them to be beautiful as we observe some interesting, unexpected patterns. The simplest example is a mosaic: in many cases, it consists of identical stones, each colored with one or another of very few colors. But it is the picture that we see, not the stones. Another equally conspicuous but less common example is Escher’s technique of etching. His works comprise simple elements whose repetitive appearance integrates in counter-expected ways, such as an optical illusion (e.g., water flowing upward). Opti­cal illusions are somewhat surprising, and their use is often judged a mere gimmick. Escher repeatedly utilized gimmicks and always in his specific way: it is not any single appearance of an item but rather its repetition, the pattern as a whole, that gives the illusion, and he plays with it, showing his spectator how it evolves by laying bare its stages.^[69] Thus, the illusion is his clever means for enhancing the pattern that his work displays. That he used the same idea in many of his works may lead viewers to tiredness. This phenomenon, however, is extraneous to art: tourists hungry for art may find the effect of visiting one cathe­dral after another tiring and flat. This is a famous phenomenon called the deja vu effect. Those tourists then have to rest before they may continue to visit more cathedrals with renewed pleasure. Whether or not they are beautiful cathedrals, tiredness makes them all equal and therefore non-art, but only as long as it lasts. Art may outlast tiredness, and great art certainly does.

For another example, it is well known that in music, a sequence of tones that makes for a melody is not beautiful if it exhibits a pattern that is too expected (as in playing a hurdy-gurdy) and it is not beau­tiful if it does not exhibit a noticeable pattern (as in chaotic random sequence). It is clear that the sequence has parts that are unexpected but accepted all the same as “making sense” once noticed. Wejudge a melody beautiful when we discover a rather interesting (i.e., unex­pected) order of notes. This is not to say that on repetition of listening to the same melody its freshness will remain; that depends on whether it keeps us interested or starts to bore us. To mention another famil­iar phenomenon, when a new style of music appears, we may find the patterns difficult to notice, and then we judge those works to be chaotic and therefore of no interest. When we then learn the new lan­guage or the new style and see patterns in works that follow it, we gain appreciation, and then we can judge the musical pieces as expected or unexpected, as the case may be.^[70]

This also explains why it is that when a new style occurs, the market may quickly be flooded with imitations of successful works - namely, works in the same style or exhibiting similar patterns, Soon, the public learns to discriminate, and the flood of much work that we judged first as great art and then as not so great becomes a trickle of great art that we judge classic and bear repetition thereof. Again, the question about what repetition survives and what sinks into oblivion is not a matter for this study to adjudicate, except to say that what stays keeps attracting our attention and, thus, our interest. It may be trivial to say that good art is not boring. Yet, we suffer so much boredom under the guise of art that the idea that boredom and art are enemies still deserves repetition. Not for long, we hope.

Pretty Average Faces

Another seeming refutation of our fragmentary and tentative theory is the empirical observation that was discovered in the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton: people judge as beautiful the merged image of randomly collected faces (within one social context) into one by superposing and averaging them. These merged images of faces are meant to be average faces - they have averaged-size noses, averaged-size eyes, and so forth. Because the average is expected, it is contrary to our fragmentary and tentative theory demanding that beautiful faces should be unexpected. This criticism is just. It has an easy and convincing answer, though, as follows:

1.      Psychological research has repeatedly indicated that, when watching faces, we attend to very small differences. Therefore, the range of size that we grasp as average is very narrow, so being within this range is infrequent.

2.      An image consists of many visible parts. In an average face, every part is average. As previously mentioned, the probability of each part to be average is low. Hence, a face all the parts of which are average is very improbable, much unexpected.^{[71] [72]}

Psychological research indicates also that some beautiful faces are far from the average (again, locally speaking) - for example, a face with large eyes and lips and a small nose. Such faces meet our fragmentary and tentative theory in that they are (1) infrequent and so unexpected, and (2) not due to some ill fate.¹¹

Humor

The learned literature deems humor to be a part of aesthetics. Two ideas have been suggested for explaining humor: the incongruity the­ory and the superiority theory. The incongruity theory is the sugges­tion that the perception of incongruity makes us laugh. For example, many jokes create expectations that are suddenly shown to be com­pletely wrong (i.e., Kant, Schopenhauer). The superiority theory is the suggestion that the sudden realization of our superiority is what makes us laugh, and we feel superior to the object of our laughter. For example, we laugh at a person who slips on a banana peel (i.e., Hume, Bergson). These theories have met with much criticism. They are even more open to criticism when we consider them aesthetic theories - that is, when we consider all enjoyable jokes beautiful and vice versa. Here, we are concerned with aesthetics, not with laughter, because our tentative theory is only fragmentary: we do not assume that all enjoyable jokes are beautiful, but we try to explain why we deem beautiful those that are enjoyable.

Therefore, being a fragmentary and tentative theory, our view of beauty can partly agree with each of these theories but not wholly so. We assume that the perception of momentary unexpectedness may make us laugh. We should add, though, that our fragmentary and tentative theory makes better sense of these two theories. Incongruity is unexpected, but when it is immediately resolved, we laugh. It requires both an incongruity (as surprise) and its resolution (as no chaos). Likewise, we view slipping on a banana peel as an unexpected event that raises tension resulting in sympathy, so that the superiority is only part of the humor: when we see that the person suffers no serious damage, the tension dissipates and we laugh. But had the incident ended in a tragedy, we might not have laughed. (This is in contrast to the superiority theory, of course.) Here is another and more artistic item: in a drama, we often experience curtailed laughter or observe an actor laugh heartily and then end up in heart-wrenching tears. Humor is shortlived; true art endures.^[73]

Non-Reductionism and Non-Relativism

To reiterate, our view does not reduce aesthetics to psychology. The wish to do so rests on the thesis that the meaning of every aesthetical judgment can be fully expressed as a statement about a psychological disposition or event. However, as previously mentioned, we do not present here an analysis of the meaning of the aesthetical judgment. Rather, we endorse a fragmentary and tentative theory that answers the question: What are the conditions for ascribing beauty? It is obvious that these conditions do not explain all aspects of the aesthetical experience; however, analyzing this experience is beyond the scope of this work.

Aestheticjudgments are seldom unanimous. We usually differ in aesthetic judgments. This observation is so common that it comes in a hackneyed expression: “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”; it has a name: relativism. A difference is not always a disagreement, and a dis­agreement is not always rational. Reasonable discussions about it make it so. Still, one may declare all discussions unreasonable unless they come to a unanimous conclusion, and one may declare them unrea­sonable under any conditions. One may then say that they express some feelings (usually exasperation; at times, hostility) and no more than that.

Even if as a result of a discussion one party changes its view (e.g., if one sees beauty where one previously saw none), relativists may and usually will declare it irrational and, possibly, a process of helping one improve one’s taste (e.g., Susan Sontag). This is an error: relativists should speak of a change of taste, not of improvement: improvement belongs to a better aesthetic perception. To reduce this improvement to psychology, one has to speak of the psychology of tastes as better or worse; by relativism, this descriptive psychology is impermissible: rel­ativists deny that there is anything objective, such as beauty, by which to set a psychological scale. Judgments are part of psychology only on the assumption that there is something to judge. The hackneyed slogan, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is the denial of the very possibility of any aestheticjudgment and also only peripherally of rational arguments on aesthetics.^[74] Therefore, the relativists must view all tastes of one individual as one given datum and all change of taste as the outcome of a sort of browbeating or coaxing, even if it comes from some expert in art appreciation or an art lover. Indeed, relativists have to view all possible influences of experts in art appreciation and all possible influences of art lovers as a kind of brainwashing. We there­fore deem the very occurrence of rational aesthetic disagreements as a refutation of relativism. We present the following examples.

Aesthetic Disputes

To reiterate, aesthetics matters: people care about which paintings should be hung in a museum or in the home and what kind of building should be constructed. So they argue about them. In many cases, these arguments are emotional so they can easily become intimidating and even humiliating. Which ways, if any, are there to make these arguments friendlier? We suggest that the rationality of arguments renders them less intimidating and friendlier. How, then, can we make them more rational?

Our answer rests on the repeated observation that rational debates about art occur regularly. The fragmentary and tentative theory of beauty that we propose is that, to some extent, beauty is explicable as (ι) unexpected, (2) ordered, and (3) not ill-fated. When arguing about a piece of art, we can try to explain its beauty to some extent by describing the way in which it exhibits these qualities. Following are two examples.

Consider disputes about modern art. In many cases, it is well known that the difference in aesthetic intuition about modern art concerns the ability to perceive patterns. Some do see patterns in these works and others see in them nothing but chaos. Such differences can be resolved by describing the patterns or, alternatively, by showing them scant and unsatisfactory.

Other disputes result from the selection of different objects or events that are supposed to be unexpected. The dispute about post­modern art is an example of this. By intention, postmodern art has vulgar aspects, and those aspects, admittedly, are not too beautiful. However, following Robert Venturi, one can see in the Las Vegas Strip, which admittedly has ugly facades, a certain opulence, a certain new artistic freedom that fits the background of the services that Vegas offers. This aspect is unexpected and, as such, it just may have the aesthetical value that Venturi finds there.

Our view is in contrast with the unfortunately quite common view that questions of art are decided by the inhabitants of the somewhat mythical art world: art critics, museum curators, gallery owners, and all sorts of connoisseurs. It is obvious that this common view blocks rational debate and is responsible for the passion of dissenters and the humiliation of outsiders. The fragmentary and tentative theory of beauty that we propose is thus situated very nicely between two vulgar views: one that says there is no aesthetic judgment and the other that says it is in the possession of experts. These are two poles of one myth (Claude Levi-Strauss-style), and we can do better without this myth because it is not as helpful as the idea that improvements of aesthetic judgments are possible, and that rational debates and experts may help, particularly when experts criticize our aesthetic ideas and point at our shortcomings to the benefit of us all.