ABSTRACT

The Aesthetic value is to be found in the interrelations among elements within artworks that create a kind of internal logic or purpose that enriches the experience of their audiences without being expressible in fixed rules. The objective properties to which one responds when one calls a work tightly knit, poignant, true to life, subtle, or bold are once more formal, expressive, representational, and symbolic features of the work, now together with properties that relate the work to prior art or artistic traditions. The first evaluative aesthetic properties supervene on objective properties of artworks. The second objective properties are criteria for evaluative properties. To relativize evaluations to different tastes and leave it at that would be to imply that a typical 1950 rock song is as good as The Marriage of Figaro and that pulp romances are as good as Middle-march. So relativize judgments only to those with developed or educated tastes.