Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction

It's really for very young students who know virtually nothing about psychology, perception or art history, western or non-western. He is so concerned not to scare anyone away with anything complex that he spends too much time worrying about occidentocentricity. We all get it that other cultures have made different art, and that we won't ever be able to fully understand why they made the art that they did. He says almost nothing about music, a fault in my view.

I bought this book because I'm the sort of person who is mostly interested in science, finance, and history. I'm don't really know what looks good and thought it might be interesting to learn a bit about what characteristics make things look aesthetically appealing. I don't know much about this but know that certain proportions, colour combinations and symmetries obviously appeal to a majority of people. Unfortunately this book seems to come from the angle of a university trying to teach people critical thinking and that different things appeal to different people, a point that is very obvious to me, but despite this about half the book is focused on making the point. This is done with some good examples of how some cultures like different things to what appeals in the west. However there isn't much discussion of what sort of things are liked across different cultures, and the book seems to skip these basics and jump straight to exceptions and long arguments about why you often can't say one thing is aesthetically better than another, again something that is quite obvious given it depends on taste, background and culture. This was a bit of a shame, and I was hoping to get more out the book than I did.

More of an explanation of the authors own interpretation rather than a neutral attempt to explain the subject. In that regard its a great introduction to the authors learned and respected opinion, but I wanted to make my own mind up through just bettering my understanding of the subject for myself. Where's the other half of the book??

After reading this short introduction I found myself puzzled about what an aesthetic experience is, what it is about, and why one might want to have such an experience in the first place. I did gather from the book that an aesthetic experience sometimes, but not always, involves "free and open ended attention," but this turns out to be just a fancy way of describing "savoring" the overall qualities of an experience without a particular goal in mind. According to the author, aesthetic experience does not pertain to any objective quality of the thing one pays attention to. Any aesthetic judgment one might have is entirely due to bias (cultural bias, exposure bias, and so on.) So no aesthetic judgement is any better than any other. Apparently just about anything can be the subject of an aesthetic experience (it certainly doesn't have to be "art") and any value one gets from the experience (pleasure, insight, complexity, sense of formal beauty, etc.) is purely subjective if not downright pretentious. Aesthetic discussions are pointless (unless you are, say, a snobbish teenager talking about his favorite band) because they erroneously assign value to one thing over another. So, apparently, aesthetics is nothing more that really liking something for personal reasons and then paying attention it. Other more complex ideas about Aesthetics, (like say Kant's) are touched on briefly and offhandedly dismissed. I finished the book wondering, "if that's all there is to aesthetics, why bother having a special word for it? Why write a book about it at all?" In a sense, the book did do its job, because I immediately bought a longer book (And Introduction to Aesthetics by Gordon Graham) that investigates the rich and sumptuous array of aesthetic theories that differ from the stultifying one presented in this introduction.

If I could, i would ask for a refund...

This book provides beginners with the basic tools to help them understand a rather complex topic.

This book is great for its contemporary value, not much its historical value. Don‘t get confused and think it‘s about the history of western aesthetics. In my humble opinion, it is more about the problems of aesthetic in a general manner. I strongly recommend it.

I wanted an introduction to aesthetics and got a "critical" introduction to it instead. The author definitely has his own take on aesthetics, but it resonated with me, so I enjoyed it quite a lot. Do not expect to get an unbiased theoretical breakdown of the subject. This book is more the author's personal take on the topic. Still quite interesting.