ABSTRACT
The works of Kant and Hegel that suggested idealist concepts of aesthetics, recognized the experience of beauty with disinterested satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) whereby beauty was not a property of any object, but an aesthetic decision based on an individual’s feelings. During the early part of the nineteenth century this approach started to be challenged by the materialist idea of the aesthetic being subject to the same ‘laws’ as other physical things where beauty was recognized in an object’s or a space’s fitness for use. Nineteenth-century aesthetic discourse then concerned itself with both a subject’s emotional experience and an object’s qualities, which were determined by what kind of object it was.
