True Beauty

Something I pulled from the article, "Viewers Make Meaning," was the concept that images are judged by two values, aesthetics and taste. Aesthetics is how visually pleasing an image or thing is according to an individual. Taste is the cultural perception of what beauty is based on experience, social class, background or education level. It takes a combination of these two values to truly interpret the beauty of an image.

The general aesthetics of an image is left up to the interpretation of an individual.  For instance, mountain landscapes with colorful rainbows are more aesthetically pleasing than most things to me, however, a sandy beach right before sunset may be more aesthetically pleasing to someone else. People are attracted to things that are aesthetically beautiful. Most would rather see a happy couple holding hands than a murder scene for instance due to the graphics of each image. Which brings us to the second value of taste.

Based on our societal acceptance of certain things and our being averse to others, our taste is shaped to view certain images more than others. Like in the previous example of the couple holding hands and the murder scene, in our society, love is supposed to be beautiful and murder is supposed to be looked down upon. For this reason, we find the couple holding hands more aesthetically pleasing because that's what our culture accepts.

Now that we have a criteria like taste when deciding the beauty of an image, society always has some sort of influence when interpreting how aesthetically pleasing that image is through our eyes.



Discussion Questions to Ponder:

1) Can we determine the aesthetics of an image in the modern day without the influence of taste?

2) How does the taste of Americans in art compare to those of the people in Africa?