Aesthetics is the study of beauty, art and taste. It asks what makes something beautiful, whether such judgments can be correct, and what art is for.

Is beauty in the object or the eye?

The central tension is whether aesthetic judgment reports a property of the thing or a response in the viewer. If it reports a property, disagreement means someone is wrong. If it reports a response, agreement becomes puzzling — and agreement is widespread.

Hume addressed this in Of the Standard of Taste (1757). Judgments of beauty are sentiments rather than descriptions, yet some critics are reliably better than others, having practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice and good sense. The standard comes from the verdict of qualified judges over time.

Kant gave the other classic answer in the Critique of Judgment (1790). A judgment of beauty is disinterested — you are not considering what the object is for or what you could get from it — and it claims universal agreement without being able to prove it. He called this subjective universality, and it is his attempt to hold both halves of the tension at once.

What art is

Definitions of art have a poor record. Representation fails to cover abstract work, expression fails to cover much formal work, and formal definitions fail to cover the readymade. Institutional theories respond by defining art in terms of the practice that receives it, which describes how the category behaves at the cost of saying little about why it matters.

The sublime, treated by Edmund Burke in 1757 and by Kant after him, names a separate response: vastness or power that overwhelms rather than pleases, and that has been central to how landscape, scale and terror function in art.

Aesthetics connects to ethics through questions about whether a morally corrupt work can be a good one, and to epistemology through the question of what an aesthetic judgment could be evidence for.