Aesthetic Appreciation: Natural, Artistic, and Media Effects

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

Abstract

This article aims to conceptualize aesthetic appreciation based on the main aesthetic theories of the last decades. The development of this analysis includes the core values that highlight the natural and urban environmental aesthetic experience. The need to know more about aesthetic experience establishes possibilities for research beyond art that focuses on natural and artificial spaces. While other traditional approaches have sought to discuss the object of aesthetics, namely artistic beauty and its relation to natural beauty, or an aesthetic appreciation of nature without necessarily the artistic object, this article seeks a reflection on art concerning natural and urban interdisciplinary reality. The following questions guide this reflection: What is the difference between artistic and natural aesthetic appreciation? How does the environment offer aesthetic effects and resonances across socio-territorial boundaries through the media? Before any manifestation or representation, individuals establish their actions through their perceptions. An individual chooses, organizes, and transforms the information that comes to him or her from the environment, resulting in the continuous construction of mental representations according to their participation. In this sense, the scope of environmental aesthetics applies to this reflection in the relationship of the natural environment influenced by humans and the things related to the environment. Therefore, observing the aesthetics associated with the arts and the everyday objects and environments of public life is essential, as is observing their political and cultural implications. The conception, a priori, of environmental and everyday aesthetics is analyzed concerning the individual in the public space, considering the relationships of individuals with the arts and the environment through the media. Thus, this analysis enables an understanding—not necessarily chronologically—but with a notion of knowledge grounded in aesthetic theories and the foundations of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline.