Abstract

The aesthetic object itself poses problems of authenticity. Even when not man-made it may afford aesthetic satisfaction and whoever first approves it may be thought of as a proto-artist, but he cannot be called a creative artist. Approved but unfashioned aesthetic objects are unsigned art. Signed art is informed by the artist's activity. There is no uncommunicated art of the mind. Art exists in realization. But that realization is a phenomenality that gives the art work's authenticity as visual surface or audibility. ;Communication in art must be expressive of intention, otherwise it degenerates into mere transmission. Recordings and reproductions of art are just this--a transmission of phenomenality. Although art is expressible spatially or temporally with varying emphasis, it is always subject to the same analysis because it carries a communicatively identifiable structure. Since aesthetics is dependent upon a philosophical resolution, aesthetic theory reflects philosophy, and diverse, though not necessarily inconsistent, theories exist. The differences are in the emphasis on, for example, creative awareness, aesthetic object, or communicated content. Our appreciation of art, although variously inspired, is intuitively in the nature of an aesthetic imperative. ;Both art and language have a dynamic and a static character. The dynamic quality is seen in the verb and in the activity of art; the static is in the noun and in art appreciation. In considering the feasibility of communication we compare the discursive communication of speech, the controlled communication of science, and the freer emotionally suggestive communication of art. The common characteristic is the questioning and answering process whereby meaningfulness is revealed--in prose, hypothesis, or art work. Art has not the same purposive clarity as the discourse of science--the essential difference being that art is ambiguous. Artistic ambiguity is no defect--art is intentionally ambiguous as seen in the poetic metaphor. Whereas scientific questioning is convergent, artistic questioning is divergent. ;Mental activity is customarily classified as intellectual, emotional, intuitive, or imaginative, but one primary activity of awareness antedates these modes. It is pre-intellectual and pre-emotional and is describable as proto-aesthetic, an immediate responsiveness to perception. This reduction is not psychological; it is phenomenological. A later informed aesthetic is intersubjectively derivable as language is, but its authenticity is not within linguistics. The aesthetic structure is distinct, although it is convenient to consider a symbol as the unit element in the communication of art or language. Art symbols are better described as partial symbols. ;Classical aesthetics was concerned with the good, the true, and the beautiful, and art, in revealing these intuitive Platonic values, had at best a second-hand authenticity since it was imitative of externalities. However, art could be functional or socially valuable. Nowadays the problem is to represent the aesthetic experience as authentic by appealing to its existential ground, or to conceptual analysis. Either way the philosophical credentials of an aesthetic system must be examined; this means that awareness, self-awareness and the imperative of communication are first to be explained