ABSTRACT
The most important early discussion is that in a well known article by Frank Sibley in 1959. While Sibley speaks mainly of the application of aesthetic terms or concepts, he sometimes shifts to more natural talk of properties. For these he initially provides not a definition, but a list that he takes ostensibly to indicate the extension of the concept. His list includes: being balanced, serene, powerful, delicate, sentimental, graceful, and garish. He assumes that, having grasped this list, we could easily extend it, showing a grasp of the general concept of an aesthetic property. And indeed it seems that we can. A formal property (like being balanced) is being loosely woven; an emotion property (like serene) is angry; an evocative property (like powerful) is poignant; a broadly evaluative formal property (like graceful) is elegant; and a second-order perceptual property (like delicate) is vibrant. If we can extend the list in such fashion and exclude other properties of art works like being predominantly red or being rectangular or lasting two hours, then it seems that we can discriminate aesthetic properties from others.
