Carolyn Korsmeyer

Alexander Nehamas calls beauty a ‘promise of happiness’ and claims that it is an object of love. While this approach appealingly places beauty at the center of both artistic passion and everyday life, it also renders it riskily personal. This discussion raises two main questions to Nehamas. The first question regards the role of happiness in the concept of beauty, for many beautiful artworks seem to acknowledge the inevitability of sorrow rather than its opposite. The second question concerns how beauty may be both personal and grounded in factors sufficiently outside the self to safeguard it against the instability of individual preferences. To explore the latter issue, Nehamas's ideas are compared to those of another Platonist, Iris Murdoch.

“Of all the fine arts, drawing is indisputably the most useful, the most positive, and the most capable of practical application,” declared Sigismond Schuster, author of one of the many popular drawing books of the nineteenth century. “It might in this respect be classed rather among the useful than the ornamental arts, for it is the basis of them all, and is an indispensable auxiliary to every mechanic. Drawing is the language of nature and of the imagination; it secures ease and steadiness to the hand, gives symmetrical correctness to the eye, creates and cultivates taste, leads to the appreciation of nature’s beauties, and offers a never-ceasing source of pleasure which is inaccessible to those who have neglected the cultivation of the art.” Drawing books like Schuster’s were powerful influences over taste and artistic standards in the United States during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Moreover, to the American readership for which he wrote, Schuster’s appeal to the practical value of drawing and painting was the surest route to preparing a friendly reception for instruction in artistic sensibility.

Although we experience many cultural artifacts by way of reproductions, there remains a particular thrill in experiencing genuine objects—‘real things’. I argue that genuineness is a property that possesses many dimensions of value, including aesthetic value. Typically, aesthetic qualities are perceptual, but genuineness is not a perceptual property. I investigate the aesthetic dimensions of genuineness by considering the role of touch in encounters with old things, using the example of an ancient bronze figurine whose reputation as genuine has waxed and waned, along with its aesthetic assessment.

Genuineness is an important property of objects that are rare, old, or preserved as memorials. Being genuine enhances economic value for objects such as works of art, and it is obviously critical for historical purposes, such as assessing the artefacts from a past culture. Here I argue that genuineness is also an aesthetic property that delivers an experience of its own. I contend that the sense of touch covertly operates in such experiences, as this sense conveys the impression of being in contact with the ‘real thing’. Touch seems to operate with a kind of transitivity that conducts the past into the present. However, the foundation for that impression may appear dubious, as it compares closely with what has been dubbed ‘magical thinking’. Under these circumstances, is the aesthetic value accorded genuineness sensible or irrational? An apprehension of something real or a pleasant delusion? I defend the transitivity of touch by comparing it to similar phenomena already recognized in studies of perception and emotion

The sense of taste has served as a governing metaphor for aesthetic discernment for several centuries, and recent philosophical perspectives on this history have invited literal, gustatory taste into aesthetic relevance. This paper summarizes the disposition of taste in aesthetics by means of three stories, the most recent of which considers food in terms of aesthetics and its employment in works of art. I conclude with some reflections on the odd position that taste has achieved in the postmodern art world, and I make a case for the often unnoticed role that bodily senses have in the apprehension of art.