Basic concepts of aesthetics

Aesthetics is an integral part of the worldview and is in close connection with life, contributing to the development of Soviet culture and the aesthetic education of the broad masses. Aesthetics is the science that studies the beautiful in reality, the aesthetic attitude towards reality, towards nature and society. "Aesthetics in the broad sense of the word is science, which studies the aesthetic form of the spiritual assimilation of reality, which takes place in everyday life and in any kind of activity, but mainly in art."

In a narrow sense, aesthetics means the science of the most general laws of the development of art. In this art is considered as the highest form of aesthetic development of reality. As a science of the most general laws of the development of art, aesthetics occupies an intermediate position between philosophy and the sciences of particular types of art.

Aesthetics is based on the dialectic-materialistic philosophy and is a general theoretical basis for special branches of art history. On this basis, it is possible to proceed to the dismemberment of aesthetics in its narrow sense. It is addressed to philosophy by the party that embodies the general aesthetic position and is engaged in the study of the most general laws of artistic development, acting every time in various forms characteristic of particular types of art.

Special aesthetics studies the specific forms of the manifestation of general artistic laws in certain types of art and their special laws. There are aesthetics of literature (or the theory of literature), aesthetics of visual art, musical aesthetics, aesthetics of cinema, etc. This provision allows us to talk about furniture aesthetics, that is, about the specific forms of manifestation of general artistic laws in such a significant element of direct human service. and groups of people, like furniture, with which a person interacts in his home, at work, on vacation, etc.

The significance of objects directly surrounding a person can be illustrated in fig. 56 and the following quotation: “The historically developed social need to introduce the artistic principle into all groups of objects with which people have to surround themselves, leads to the fact that artistic and design creativity creates a closed utilitarian-aesthetic environment around a person and for this, as it surrounds him with a system of one after another concentric spheres. It begins with the decoration of the human body itself, then constructs an artistically meaningful shell (clothing) for its body and combines various decorations with it, then makes aesthetically valuable all the things that a person operates in his daily life activities, starting from religious, household and industrial utensils ( tools, tools, devices) and ending with the furnishings of the premises where he lives, works and communicates with his own kind, it gives artistic meaning to architectural structures in which and between which everything flows his life (including buildings and various special objects, large and small, from a bridge and a television mast to a kiosk and an urn), extends its aesthetic activity to the design of means of transportation for land and underground, water and air, which intrudes and, finally, into nature itself, transforming it aesthetically (the so-called “green architecture”).

Fig. 1. Closed utilitarian-aesthetic environment of man

Thus, in our days, all spheres of the national economy are subject to aesthetics: production, circulation, education, everyday life.

Before considering the specific aesthetic requirements for modern furniture should briefly focus on the basic aesthetic concepts.

General logical concepts that reveal the content of aesthetics as a science, generalizing the aesthetic originality of the surrounding reality, are called the category of aesthetics. Categories such as aesthetic perception, aesthetic taste, experience, ideal, etc., belong to the field of aesthetic consciousness. The most common are the following categories: beauty, beautiful, sublime, base, ugly, drama, aesthetic measure. There is a group of aesthetic categories that summarizes the patterns of artistic creativity, therefore it is applicable only to the field of art. These include: artistic image, artistic method, artistic skill, etc.

The special ability of a person to feel the beauty of the objects around him (the beauty of their form, color, musical sound, etc.), to distinguish between beautiful and ugly, tragic and comic, sublime and base features in the behavior of people and heroes of works of art while experiencing a sense of pleasure , pleasure or displeasure, is called aesthetic perception, which develops on the basis of sensory perception - a person's ability when exposed to various objects on the organs of sight and hearing through rvnoy system, transmission of nerve excitation in the brain reflect (feel) the spatial shape of objects, color and sound, and so on. d.

Aesthetic vopriyatie always accompanied by a special experience - aesthetic feeling. Therefore, when they talk about the aesthetic properties of things, they mean the presence of a person endowed with such a feeling. There is a definite connection between a beautiful thing and a person perceiving beauty - the aesthetic attitude of man to reality. For the emergence of aesthetic sense requires a special visual signal. Note the natural relationship between the visually perceptible form, utility, value and sensual response of a person who has a positive or negative emotional tone. In practical activities, a person learned to reveal the stable links between the visually perceptible structure and the utilitarian value of a thing.

Aesthetic taste allows a person to understand and evaluate the aesthetic features of objects and phenomena of nature, social life. He expresses an assessment of the reality, diversity of aesthetic values ​​from the perspectives developed by a person in the process of social practice of ideas about the beautiful, ugly, comic, tragic, etc. Marxist-Leninist aesthetics recognizes the taste of a person’s historically arisen ability, generated by social practice. direct estimates.

One of the most important categories of aesthetics is the category of beauty, which along with the category of beauty serves to determine and evaluate the aesthetic properties of objects and phenomena of reality: perfection, harmony, expressiveness, completeness.

Beauty, as a certain combination of properties of objects and phenomena of reality, man, products of material and spiritual production, works of art, is characterized by a variety of attributes: proportionality and proportionality, harmony of parts and play of colors, brightness and novelty, expediency and integrity of form, conformity of form to content and t Beauty is a social property of things, therefore it has the same characteristics as other social properties: use, convenience, expediency and . D. Beauty inherent specificity. It manifests itself and exists in social processes, is objectively present in things, regardless of the will and desire of individuals who perceive it with varying degrees of subjectivity, is measured by social measures (norms, ideals) that take shape in historically specific forms of human activity. The value of beauty is relative: the emergence of new, more advanced products leads to a public reassessment of aesthetic criteria.

One of the most important and broad categories of aesthetics is associated with the category of beauty - namely, the category of beauty, which serves to define and positively evaluate the most perfect phenomena in reality, social life, in the activities of people, and art. Marxist-Leninist aesthetics considers the beautiful in nature as the result of harmony and completeness in the ratio of the parts of the material world, the manifestation of its properties and attributes.

The concept of aesthetic value speaks of the ability of objects and natural phenomena or products of human labor due to the presence of certain properties to satisfy the aesthetic needs of a person, to arouse aesthetic experience in him. The range of aesthetic values ​​is extremely wide. First of all, this is the man himself, as well as all the subjects of his creative work, created according to the laws of beauty. One of the most significant discharges of aesthetic values ​​is made up of works of art: monuments of architecture, works of sculpture, painting, fiction, etc. Although the idea of ​​the aesthetic value of certain objects changes during the course of historical development and is class in class society, in it always concluded objective, universal content.

The value of artistic and aesthetic values ​​is especially great in a socialist society, which opens up unlimited possibilities for their creation and use in the interests of the working people. The artistic principle further inspires the work of the Soviet people, adorns their life and ennobles a person.

As in any other science, various aspects of aesthetics are distinguished depending on the specific form of communication with practice. It has a research-theoretical and practical, applied side. The following briefly describes the concepts that are closest to the characteristics of the artistic form of the object.

Art form (Latin forma - external view) is the structure of a work of art created using the graphic-expressive means of this art to express artistic content. The form of the work must have internal unity. Harmony, proportionality of its elements are necessary conditions for completeness, perfection, beauty of a work of art.

“Each functioning material form serves for a person as an expression of the public value of a thing. In his view, perfect and expedient forms correspond to useful, perfect, expedient things. The proportional, large-scale form, for example, is inherent in good things, and disproportionate, non-scale - bad. So there is an idea of ​​a complex of signs and features of forms reflecting the value of a thing. The form of things, becoming the bearer of information about the value of the product, acquires a certain independence. It causes a conscious or unconscious emotional reaction in a person, in which the immediate sensual evaluation of the form is expressed. ”

The aesthetic attitude of man to the subject, the sensual evaluation of his aesthetic properties is formed on the basis of the utilitarian.

The most important element of the form of any work of art is its composition (Latin compositio — location, composition, combination) —that is, its construction, the location of its main elements and parts in a particular system and sequence. For each of the types of art has its own special compositional techniques. The means of ordering the composition are proportions (Latin propotio - ratio, from portio - part, proportion) - proportionality, a certain ratio of parts of objects and phenomena among themselves, one of the manifestations of harmony.

Harmony (Greek. Harmonia - connection, harmony) - proportionality, consistency of the sides of objects and phenomena: specific unity in diversity. In art - the organic relationship of all components of the work of art.

The concept of harmony received a genuinely scientific justification only in Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, which comes from an objective basis of harmony, believes that harmony is one of the essential signs of the beautiful, that natural processes are its source in art.

Clarity, clarity and harmony of the artwork contributes to the rhythm (Greek. Rhythmos - uniformity, harmony) - a consistent alternation of comparable elements in works of art, reflected in the art of rhythmic processes of the objective world.

Color belongs to the most important elements of the artistic form of a work of art (Latin color - paint, color) - a harmonious combination of colors, contributing to the disclosure of the content, meaning of the work, revealing its essence.

The aesthetic quality of a work of art largely depends on its expressiveness, i.e., the ability of the artist through various artistic techniques to vividly convey human emotions, moods, passions, his ability to find and use in figurative characteristics such details that most fully reveal the essence of the depicted phenomenon or character, determine the expressiveness of works of art in general or its individual parts and images. Expressiveness is specifically manifested in various forms of art.

One of the most effective artistic techniques is the contrast (fr. Contrasfe - a sharp difference, the opposite) - a technique consisting in a pronounced opposition of the qualities (eg, volumes, colors) and characters of objects and phenomena depicted in works of art, which helps to sharpen their characteristics .

A prerequisite for the creation of genuine artwork is the unity of content and form. The essence of this law is that the form of a work of art is organically linked to the content and is determined by it; the latter, in turn, is manifested only in a certain form.