In a broad sense – a branch of philosophy, whose subject is the beauty of art and nature.
According to its current use, this definition of aesthetics is, on the one hand, broad, on the other – I claim narrow.
It is too broad, as the object of aesthetics today is limited to human artifacts. Natural phenomena, such as the seascape and the sunset, are clearly falling out of this object.
But the definition is also too narrow because modern specialists are not dedicated – in the first place, if they decide to do it at all, to the discovery of forms of beauty. While the classics of aesthetics sought to define beauty as a general concept (take, for example, Thomas Aquinas‘ definition of beauty as that which gives pleasure or enjoyment of perception) and to develop the criteria by which beautiful objects can be identified, the main guidelines of contemporary aesthetics are to the essence of the nature of art, and even more generally, to the processes of signification. We rarely ask about a work of art, “Is it beautiful?“, But we often wonder, “Is this art?” or “What does that mean?“.
Many works of contemporary art are self-aware experiments with multiple and often mixed intermediaries to express pseudo-meanings or to provoke an unexpected response. According to a very influential approach to that of Russian formalism, the function of art is to make the known strange (these are methods of “alienation”). Such art is a field that requires research from a semiotic point of view.
