Knowra Aesthetic autonomy Aesthetic autonomy Aesthetic autonomy is the idea that art can be valued by standards internal to artistic experience rather than by practical, moral, or political purposes.
Immanuel Kant : An eighteenth-century German philosopher whose critical philosophy shaped modern accounts of judgment, beauty, and reason. His account of disinterested judgments of beauty became a foundation for treating aesthetic value as distinct from utility.
Aesthetic judgment : A judgment that evaluates an object through the pleasure or displeasure it gives in perception. It locates aesthetic value in a mode of judgment not reducible to usefulness or factual knowledge.
Instrumentalism (art) : The view that art is valuable chiefly as a means to moral, political, educational, or other ends. It directly opposes the claim that artistic value can stand apart from practical consequences.
Theodor W. Adorno : A German philosopher and social theorist who analyzed modern art, culture, and society. Adorno argued that art’s relative autonomy can let it resist the social order while remaining shaped by it.
Critique of the Power of Judgment : Immanuel Kant’s 1790 work on aesthetic judgment, teleology, and the relation between nature and human understanding. Kant’s analysis of judgments of beauty gives a central philosophical basis for aesthetic autonomy.
Formalism (art) : An approach to art that emphasizes perceptible form and relationships among artistic elements. Formalism offers one account of how artworks can be assessed by standards internal to their form.
Marxist aesthetics : Approaches to art that examine its relation to class, ideology, labor, and material social conditions. Marxist accounts challenge the image of art as independent from the society that produces and circulates it.
Culture industry : A term for the mass production and standardization of cultural goods under modern capitalism. Its critique raises the question of whether art can remain autonomous when made for commercial circulation.
Disinterestedness : A mode of attention that takes pleasure in an object without seeking to possess or use it. It explains how aesthetic appreciation can be separated from desire for practical benefit.
Art for art's sake : The principle that art need not justify itself through moral instruction, political service, or practical utility. This slogan states the strongest claim that art’s purposes can be self-contained.
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