Topic > Of the Standard of Taste by David Hume - 533

IntroductionAesthetics is, to put it simply, the study of art, beauty, and related judgments. Since society tends not to view art as a functional endeavor, this branch of study may seem pointless; in fact a well-known aesthete and self-proclaimed professor of aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, stated “All art is completely useless”. However, this phrase is misleading, and the same man also said: "Aestheticism is a search for the signs of beauty. It is the science of beauty through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more precisely, the search of the secret of life." Now, this seems more interesting and important than the study of a “useless” topic, and whether or not the study of aesthetics plays a blatantly “functional” role in our lives, it certainly appeals to our humanity, to our sense common sense of beauty and capacity for aesthetic experience and can potentially deepen our understanding of this phenomenon that has existed since the dawn of man. To explain it in a less broad and elevated way, aesthetics asks questions along the lines of “what is art?"?”, “...