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We may thus distinguish between different types of kitsch of varying degrees of universality. Christian kitsch—exemplified by plastic Jesus babies, pictures of the Virgin Mary, or scenes of the Crucifixion—combines the universal elements of kitsch with symbolism relating to the articles of Christian faith. Communist kitsch—depicting smiling workers in factories, young couples on tractors cultivating a collective farm or building a hydroelectric power station—played on the mythical values of the joy of work and the enthusiasm for building a classless society. Capitalist kitsch, exemplified by advertising, on the other hand, uses class distinctions and status symbols to create artificial needs and illusions to foster the ideology of the consumer society. There can also be even more specific national kitsch that exploits the sentiments associated with national symbols and leaders: Mao Tse-tung leading the Great March, Lenin speaking to the workers, or good-hearted Hitler holding a child in his arms. The subject matter of kitsch may vary considerably in accordance with beliefs and traditions. What remains constant is that the consumer of kitsch is never emotionally indifferent to what the picture represents.

Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions.

Kitsch does not exploit the artistic possibilities of structural elaboration, extension of expressive potentialities, elaboration of unique individual features, interpretation, and innovation. It does not sharpen, amplify, or transform the associations related to the depicted subject matter in any significant way. As opposed to real art, which involves an enhancement of certain experiences, kitsch tones them down.

Beauty, if we possess the senses to perceive it, is different from joy that appears with the prospect of advantage.

We do not see the great cost and lack of utility to obtain beauty, which compensates us through its ideas and the pleasure that rises from them.

This means that our desire for beauty can only be counterbalanced by an even greater desire.

The significance of Addison's concept of the sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination that he identified; greatness, uncommonness, and beauty, "arise from visible objects" (that is, from sight rather than from rhetoric). It is also notable that in writing on the "Sublime in external Nature", he does not use the term "sublime" but uses semi-synonymous terms: "unbounded", "unlimited", "spacious", "greatness", and on occasion terms denoting excess.

 the sublime was of three kinds: the noble, the splendid, and the terrifying.

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

The sublime, then, is our strongest passion, and it is grounded in terror. Yet it is not exclusively an unpleasant emotion, for danger or pain can, in certain circumstances, give us delight. And the sublime has other qualities: it overwhelms our faculty of reason, such that we are rendered incapable of rational thought. As Burke puts it:

The passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.

Kant officially says that there are two forms of the sublime, the mathematical and the dynamical, although some commentators hold that there is a third form, the moral sublime, a layover from the earlier "noble" sublime.[12] Kant claims, "We call that sublime which is absolutely great"(§ 25). He distinguishes between the "remarkable differences" of the Beautiful and the Sublime, noting that beauty "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness"

For Kant, one's inability to grasp the magnitude of a sublime event such as an earthquake demonstrates inadequacy of one's sensibility and imagination. Simultaneously, one's ability to subsequently identify such an event as singular and whole indicates the superiority of one's cognitive, supersensible powers. Ultimately, it is this "supersensible substrate," underlying both nature and thought, on which true sublimity is located.

 the feeling of the beautiful is in seeing an object that invites the observer to transcend individuality, and simply observe the idea underlying the object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is when the object does not invite such contemplation but instead is an overpowering or vast malignant object of great magnitude, one that could destroy the observer.

• Feeling of Beauty – Light is reflected off a flower. (Pleasure from a mere perception of an object that cannot hurt observer).
• Weakest Feeling of Sublime – Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, objects devoid of life).
• Weaker Feeling of Sublime – Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
• Sublime – Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
• Full Feeling of Sublime – Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
• Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).

five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic.

The experience of the sublime involves a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might, and is similar to the experience of the tragic. The "tragic consciousness" is the capacity to gain an exalted state of consciousness from the realization of the unavoidable suffering destined for all men and that there are oppositions in life that can never be resolved, most notably that of the "forgiving generosity of deity" subsumed to "inexorable fate".

This heightened state of astonishment, where reason is driven out by “an irresistible force”, and “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain another”, is more terrible to us when it is accompanied with a sense of the unknown (or what Burke calls obscurity). For Burke, obscurity is an absence of clarity, whether in the sensory darkness of sight (or blinding lightness), or mental uncertainty of thought. As he observes, “everyone will be sensible to this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread”. He notes how religions have used darkness to create fear, such that “the druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks”. Further, it is vastness, or “greatness of dimension”, which is “a powerful cause of the sublime”, where “looking down from a precipice” on a mountain has greater impact depending of its depth and steepness, and where “the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished”. Finally, another source of the sublime is what Burke calls infinity, where the eye is not able to “perceive the bounds” of something, or “see an object distinctly”, and this gives rise to a “terrible uncertainty of the thing” perceived. For Burke: “Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime”.

Kant: "[The sublime] makes our own power of resistance trifling compared to their might.  But, provided that our own position is secure,  their aspect is all the more attractive for its fearlessness, and we are ready to call these objects sublime for they raise the forces of the soul above the vulgar and the commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of another kind, which gives us the courage of us to measure ourselves against the seemingly omnipotence of nature"

Moral sublimity?

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"silence won't protect you, it will protect those that are against you"

"it has been equally important to preserve a clear distinction between the beautiful (as a human response to objects, whether they are art objects or not) and ‘art’ as a socially constituted product or commodity"

"Beauty, then, is not the precondition but rather the result of aesthetic contemplation, of a kind of collaboration between the viewer and the work. It would therefore be nonsensical to define it in advance of, or apart from, an actual aesthetic experience."

"Beauty for Winckelmann is not something that the work of art simply displays of its own accord. Rather, it emerges in the course of prolonged contemplation and reflection on the part of the observer: ‘The first view of beautiful statues is . . . like the first glance over the open sea; we gaze on it bewildered, and with undistinguishing eyes, but after we have contemplated it repeatedly the soul becomes more tranquil and the eye more quiet, and capable of separating the whole into its particulars.’9 Winckelmann notes that he has ‘imposed upon myself the rule of not turning back until I had discovered some beauty’.10 He advises students to approach works of Greek art ‘favorably prepossessed . . . for, being fully assured of finding much that is beautiful, they will seek for it, and a portion of it will be made visible to them’.

"Greek art, wrote Winckelmann, was distinguished above all by ‘a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’.

Winckelmann asks his readers to see beyond the struggling limbs and anguished facial expressions, to sense the underlying dignity of the figures, evident in the balanced disposition of the bodily forms.

"‘The physical pain and the nobility of soul are distributed with equal strength over the entire body and are, as it were, held in balance with one another.’"

Winckelmann’s descriptions of the Apollotend to dematerialize it, to leave behind its physical existence and to contemplate what Clark calls the sculpture’s ‘idea’ (as distinct from its ‘execution’)

Let thy spirit penetrate into the kingdom of incorporeal beauties, and strive to become a creator of a heavenly nature, in order that thy mind may be filled with beauties that are elevated above nature; for there is nothing mortal here. . . . Neither blood-vessels nor sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence, diffusing itself like a gentle stream, seems to fill the whole contour of the figure. Winckelmann has been faithful to his own rule, not turning back until he has found beauty. Where Clark would stop at the slick, mechanical character of the copyist’s execution, Winckelmann sees beyond the immediate surface texture. And as he looks, he responds corporeally: ‘In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else, and I myself take a lofty position for the purpose of looking upon it in a worthy manner.’

My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence, like the breasts of those who were filled with the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and into the Lycaean groves—places which Apollo honored by his presence,—for my image seems to receive life and motion, like the beautiful creation of Pygmalion.20

For Kant the judgement of taste is always singular: ‘I must present the object immediately to my feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and that, too, without the aid of concepts’.3

But if we felt confident that we had purged away all of our interests, and all thought of the work’s purposes, then we should truly be entitled to call it beautiful in a pure judgement of taste. This would be exceptionally difficult, however; moreover, we would have to ignore many of the most salient or intriguing aspects of the work.

Such considerations suggest another possible approach, also entertained by Kant: we may need to distinguish between objects amenable to the judgement of taste in the strictest sense and others, such as the David, which are likely to involve non-aesthetic considerations. In the first case the judgement will be one of free beauty, altogether independent of interests or ends; in the second it will be one of dependent beauty, in which our response to the object is influenced by considerations other than the mere delight we experience in contemplating it.37 The distinction proves paradoxical. The judgement of free beauty is more rigorous and pure, and it is altogether unaffected by prejudice or bias; here there is no constraint whatsoever on the free play of mind. Yet the objects amenable to this kind of judgement turn out to be strangely haphazard, if not trivial. ‘Flowers are free beauties of nature’, Kant writes: ‘Many birds (the parrot, the humming-bird, the bird of paradise), and a number of crustacea, are self-subsisting beauties which are not appurtenant to any object defined with respect to its end, but please freely and on their own account.’3

Indeed, Runge’s cutouts are only comparatively free beauties in Kantian terms, for Runge must have had some kind of purpose in making them"

"

Kant declares that anything involving the human figure can only be a dependent beauty. At a stroke this overturns the most cherished assumption of all art theories since the Renaissance, one that remains basic for Winckelmann: that the human figure demonstrates the highest beauty of which we can have experience. Kant’s position is shocking, in relation to previous ideas about taste; yet it has considerable cogency. As Kant suggests, when we contemplate a human figure we are bound to respond to it as a man, woman, or child; we can scarcely set aside our own gendered identities in the process.39 Kant was also aware of the difficulties about race and ethnicity that have preoccupied recent cultural critics. As he points out, people who have lived among Africans, Asians, or Europeans have had different experiences of the visual appearance of human beings, which are bound to influence their judgements.40 Moreover, in the circumstances of the modern world it would be not only impossible but often morally wrong to exclude political or social considerations from the contemplation of human figures of different races, ethnic or cultural backgrounds.

"

The very decision to make a work of art in the first place gives the work an end or purpose; the processes of designing and executing it require the planful application of specific skills and technical procedures. In other words, the activity of making an artwork is fundamentally incompatible with beauty in any free or pure form. Paradoxically, the ‘beautiful’ work of art is unmakeable. This problem dominates Kant’s discussion of art and artists: [T]here is still no fine art in which something mechanical, capable of being at once comprehended and followed in obedience to rules . . . does not constitute the essential condition of the art. For the thought of something as end must be present, or else its product would not be ascribed to an art at all, but would be a mere product of chance.45"

"Kant’s own solution to the problem of intentionality is to invoke the notion of genius—a quality innate in creative artists that somehow swallows up or supersedes the premeditated character of artmaking. This recalls much older notions of artmaking as involving an element of magic, madness, or divine inspiration; such ideas were already associated with the term ‘genius’ and were much elaborated in nineteenthcentury theories of Romanticism in the arts.46 While Kant had little use for the more mystical aspects of such conceptions of genius, his theory clearly required some faculty by which the creative artist could operate outside the bounds of strictly logical thinking. Otherwise there would be a basic mismatch between the making of a work of art (intentional and purposive) and the experience of such a work (free and independent of any end). Thus the term ‘genius’ serves as the counterpart, in the process of artmaking, for ‘taste’ in the process of contemplating an object deemed beautiful. Both depend on an interaction of imagination and understanding in a free play that is neither determined by a definite concept nor directed towards a finite end. By attributing ‘genius’ to the creative artist, Kant attempted to explain how an artwork could be made intentionally, yet without sacrificing the element of free play.47

Kant argued that genius involved making a work that was not limited to fulfilling its basic concept or intention, but that also expressed what he called aesthetic ideas. 48 This bridged the gap between the making and the experience of the work of art, for the aesthetic ideas would suggest or stimulate a multitude of thoughts and reflections, thus encouraging the free play of imagination and understanding in the mind of the observer of the work. An artist might paint a mountain landscape that could be judged acceptable according to determinate criteria for illusionistic representation; such a work would realize the artist’s intention to paint a landscape of a certain kind. But Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog goes above and beyond merely realizing its intention. It is a work of genius in Kant’s sense, for it stimulates the observer’s mind to range freely over the widest variety of further musings"

"Any of these trains of thought would be compatible with the free play of mind so long as they did not stop short at a cut-and-dried conclusion. More importantly, when taken together they demonstrate the inexhaustibility of the thoughts and feelings to which the picture may give rise. Thus they exemplify the aesthetic ideas which, for Kant, distinguished the work of genius: ‘I mean that representation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, i.e. concept, being adequate to it’.49 The free play of mind is characteristic of all experiences of the beautiful. However, Kant speaks of aesthetic ideas only in relation to works of art. It is crucial that the aesthetic ideas are generated in the free play of imagination and understanding in the mind of a human artist, as well as stimulating an answering free play in the mind of the observer. We have seen that there is no reason why the aesthetic ideas should not involve any area within human experience. But they can also suggest or adumbrate what is beyond human experience, perhaps by imaginatively recombining sensory perceptions, or by inventing sensuous forms for immaterial ideas (Kant’s examples include ‘death, envy, and all vices, as also love, fame, and the like’50). This at last gives positive value to the work of art: unlike naturally occurring objects (such as wild flowers), art not only permits the human mind to leap beyond what empirical perception and objective knowledge can grasp, it also does so in a way that is communicable from one human being (the artist) to others.

No longer does the imitation of natural scenes or objects (mimesis in classical art theories) seem the most worthwhile activity. Instead the Kantian emphasis on aesthetic ideas seems to exhort the artist to invent as freely as possible, or even to defy everyday experience or logic"

"a wealth of aesthetic ideas that cannot be adequately encapsulated in words."

"Genius, he writes, ‘is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given: and not an aptitude in the way of cleverness for what can be learned according to some rule’; it follows that ‘originality must be its primary property’.52 Kant therefore dismisses all followers of a style or artistic trend as second-rate, in comparison with the exceptional artists who are capable of genuine originality. Once again this demolishes previous doctrines, particularly the influential theories associated with academies of art. If beauty cannot be determined by rules, then it cannot be taught in art schools or in professorial lectures. The genius might learn technical skills from a teacher or in a school, but this carries the risk of stifling her or his originality; hence the many stories about modern artists and groups of artists, from the PreRaphaelites and Impressionists to Dada and Fluxus, who rebelled against academic or institutional authority. This set of ideas paved the way for the characteristic value systems of modern art: the overwhelming privileging of artists and works that demonstrate some striking innovation, and the utter denigration of ‘academic’ or institutionally based art forms. Although, as in the case of genius, there has been some criticism of the notion of originality as unfairly privileging certain kinds of art over others, originality nonetheless remains entrenched as the most important criterion for excellence in modern art.

‘all men must admire what is beautiful, either in the arts, or in nature, because they have in their souls the sentiments of celestial origin which beauty awakens, and in which it causes them to rejoice.’6

The idea that the contemplation of the beautiful can lead to a transcendent realm derives from Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium"

For Cousin imagination and understanding are not enough, by themselves, to produce either a generous appreciation of the beautiful or powerful artistic creation; something more is needed, a love of the beautiful that enlivens both aesthetic experience and artmaking."

"‘To understand and demonstrate that a thing is not beautiful—mediocre pleasure, ungrateful task; but to discern a beautiful thing, to be penetrated with it, to put it in evidence, to make others share in the sentiment—exquisite delight [jouissance], generous task.

the ‘love’ of the beautiful must be rigorously separated from ‘desire’: ‘If the Venus [compare 12] or the St Cecilia [39] excite sensual desires in you’, he cautions, ‘you are not made to experience the beautiful’.10

the lowest is ‘physical’ beauty. Next come intellectual and moral beauty, which for Cousin are still kinds of ‘real’ beauty, available in this world."

"Socrates is not physically beautiful—but behold him as he faces death, morally resolute, ‘and his figure will appear sublime to you’. Nonetheless, even this sublime kind of ‘real beauty’ is still lower than ‘ideal beauty’, which aspires to the infinite. The wording is similar to Staël’s distinction between transient and eternal types of beauty, but in Cousin the religious dimension becomes explicit: ‘the true and absolute ideal is nothing other than God Himself ’.11

the aim of art should not be to serve religion or morality—art should not try ‘to make us better and to elevate us to God’.12

he dwells at length on a standard aspect of idealist theory, the rejection of close imitation of nature (the artist should seek to improve upon nature, in an aspiration towards the ideal). Yet he weaves this into a larger pattern, reminiscent of Kant’s careful distinctions between the beautiful and other human experiences. If the aim of art is not the imitation of nature, Cousin continues, neither is it to imitate human actions so as to inspire pity and terror beyond a certain measure: too realistic a depiction of a storm or a shipwreck will be simply unbearable to contemplate

Kant considered neither the ideal nor ‘academic’ methods of art education and artmaking to be compatible with genuinely free beauty"

"Artistic greatness could not come through the imitation either of a single model from nature (which would inevitably display imperfections), nor even through the imitation of the best aspects of a number of models, for that would not result in a coherent or unified beauty. Rather, the ideal should transcend nature, and should derive above all from the genius of the artist."

"The one constant is that beauty remained a key term for writers across the entire spectrum of political, moral, religious, and artistic opinion. Perhaps that is why beauty mattered so much, in a world where other concerns might seem more urgent. It could be argued that the aesthetic was important because it could not be mapped on to another set of concerns (political, moral, religious, or social) in any straightforward fashion. That is, debates on beauty may have offered a different set of terms in which the customary alignments no longer applied, and which could therefore produce genuinely new thinking

r. Scenes of North Africa were a staple product of French nineteenth-century artists, and some art historians have taken them to task for presenting an Oriental fantasy-world, more imaginary than accurate. But this complaint would have made little sense to Delacroix. For him the scene reached its full potential for beauty only when it was thoroughly infused by the personal ideal of the artist."

"he is not content merely to reproduce his observations. Transforming the impression in his memory, he gives it a moody atmosphere, juxtaposing figures from different sketches in a sumptuously decorated interior, in which colours and patterns weave in the complex harmonies that are crucial to Delacroix’s own ‘personal ideal’. There is no anecdotal subject-matter

It is therefore far more important for an artist to come near to the ideal which he carries in his mind, and which is characteristic of him, than to be content with recording, however strongly, any transitory ideal that nature may offer— and she does offer such aspects; but . . . the beautiful is created by the artist’s imagination precisely because he follows the bent of his own genius.33

Delacroix ends the second of his articles on the beautiful with a forthright declaration that it is the individuality of the artist that produces the beautiful, and makes the bridge between the artist’s soul and that of the observer: ‘can’t one, without paradox, affirm that it is this singularity, this personality that enchants us in a great poet and in a great artist; that the new face of things revealed by him astonishes us as much as it charms us, and that it produces in our souls the sensation of the beautiful . . .?’3

An idea in painting has not the slightest relation to an idea in literature. A hand placed in a certain way, the fingers held apart or together in a certain style, a cast of folds, an inclination of the head, an attenuated or inflated contour, a marriage of colours, a coiffure of elegant strangeness, a piquant reflection, an unexpected light, a contrast of characters between different groups, form what we call an idea in painting. That is why the painting of the women of Algiers is full of idea. . . .38

Charles Baudelaire poured scorn on what he described as the ‘heresies’ of confusing art with morality or scientific truth. Beauty, for the poet of Les Fleurs du mal (‘Flowers of Evil’, published in 1857, dedicated to Gautier, and prosecuted for immorality), may be strange, grotesque, sinister, or macabre. But it cannot be reduced to subservience, whether to noble philanthropism or to petty bourgeois morality, to radical or repressive politics, without losing all its integrity and power.

Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. . . . I defy anyone to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two elements.60

Seneca: anybody who is happy with honor is satisfied with inward happiness and not subject to fortune.