Tutorial #3. What is Beauty? What is Art? Disucssion Questions

Think about these questions in light of the lectures and the readings materials provided (Voltaire, and Neuroestethics). Try to give critical answers.

• Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?


• When we say something is beautiful, are we recommending to others that they should take delight in it?


• Beauty may be intersubjective, but is it objective? Are there objective standards of beauty?


• Can we argue rationally about whether something is beautiful?


• What does it mean to say that art expresses emotion?


• Do beauty and happiness go together?


• What is the role of the experience of beauty in a good life?


• Is taste a function of education and economics? Or perhaps, is it more a "hard-wired" neurobiological function?


• Is natural beauty ever better than constructed beauty, like in art or music?


• Must art be beautiful to be great art?


• Does placing a work (any work) in a museum makes that work a work-of-art? Contrast Duchamp’s Fountain and Botticelli’s Primavera. They are both in museums. Are they both works of art? Why? Or why not?