Why do we care so much about aesthetics? I guess this is a kind of closing blog, which will probably be filled with mainly questions. We all have all sat in class day after day with some kind of objective, so I guess I’m asking what that has been for each of us. I understand that the answer will most likely differ, however I ask out of curiosity. Is it aesthetics that kept us there? Was it the challenges that some of the arguments raised to notions that we already had? This course was an upper level elective and so we all choose to be there, so why?

The things that can effectively be argued as being art, seem to serve no actual practical use in an average individual’s day to day life. By average I simply mean the random person that one could bump in to on the street. However, the truth is that we are all constantly bombarded be constant expressions of art, and thus it becomes very difficult to not care about that which is so prevalent in our lives. No matter how indefinable we may find the topic to be at times. It is in part because of this, at times indefinable quality that we take so much pleasure in it being a topic of discussion.

Does the lack of a universal definition of art allow for art to be subjective? In other words, can something be art to me, but not to someone else?

First I'm not sure that when people say that they do not consider something art, that they in fact mean what they say. I think some of cases what people mean when they say that something is not art is that it is not good art according to their taste. Also, I think that what tends to happen sometimes is that people say they do not like things simply because they do not fully understand them.I personally do not a agree that simply because we cannot come to a universal definition on something that this thing then comes subjective. It just means that the definitions which we have are no fully adequate, and that they still need to be refined. There are common conceptions of things which are not art, and although this may not be a helpful argument as to what is art, it could be a starting point. I do admit that art does contain qualities which are subjective such as beauty, however, the presence on such qualities is not what defines art as being art. I think that part of the difficulty with defining art is that, art is in part a mode of expression and thus in constantly developing or growing as are those individuals who create it.

If it's true that art expression is ever changing then can we ever come up with a concrete definition of it?