Techne

Every community has art; that is to say, songs are sung, pictures are painted, poems are recited, statues are carved; and, at least in civilized communities, there is also what may be called serious art. By this we mean that there is a tradition of informed critical discussion of such works, involving the comparison of the relative merits and defects of different works or performances, and to which artists respond in a conscious way. Such aesthetic discussion is to be distinguished from the pre-aesthetic discussion of the same sorts of works. The difference is that between a discussion of the power or efficiency of two statues as embodiments of a divinity (which grants more prayers, perhaps) and a discussion of the merits of the two statues as statues: as elegant, beautiful, sublime or whatever the community's aesthetic criteria may be. The concept of efficiency presupposed by the functionalist or pre-aesthetic discussion may be ill-founded, as in the case of the two statues; but that discussion is nevertheless functionalist in form. It is the difference between the two forms of discussion in which we are interested. Similarly, an instrumentalist may be evaluated pre-aesthetically, in terms of his efficiency in performing some social or other function (e.g. ‘he's good to dance to’), but may also be judged aesthetically, if such criteria have been evolved by the society. Works produced in a context of non-functional discussion, whether or not they are also discussed functionally, are the subject-matter of aesthetics

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Dance · Epistemology · Instrumentalism · Linguistics · Literature · Object (grammar · Poetry · Sociology · Subject matter · Sublime · Visual arts · Arts, Culture, and Music Studies · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy