Art and Aesthetics inside the Images

Jarmo Valkola

Julia Townsend

Lack ("Eksiklik I and II")
acrylic on canvas
160 x 80 cm (vertical diptych)

A variety of desires

“The soul never thinks without an image.” – Aristotle

Aesthetic study of the images can proceed from the premise that the aesthetic instructional enterprise is problematic and embedded in social implications and significance. We can think of artworks as things that have one or more of a number of qualities, chief among which are those identified by the major historical theories of art. A work may have some of the qualities identified as important by the representational, expressionist or formalist theories, no one of them being essential, any one of them being sufficient. There are two slightly different ways of talking about aesthetic qualities of images and the experiences around them. Firstly, we can think of their character as totally perceptual like perceiving colours. So, it is possible to speak of the quality of aesthetic experience, and the pleasure of things. Secondly, we can think of aesthetic qualities related to meanings, and try to interpret their significance in order to understand them. It is a question of the depth of art and aesthetics, and the insights it brings. Our tradition of art has for over a century been in a state of continuous change. It has consisted of a succession of movements and styles, accompanied by a value system that promotes change and results in the deliberate search for the new and the discontinuous.

When philosophers of aesthetics talk about what, for example, poems express, they are not thinking broadly about the communication of ideas. For them, what get expressed are certain human qualities (also known as anthropomorphic properties), notably emotional tones, moods, emotively coloured attitudes, and the like. That is, the concept of expression that concerns philosophers of art is the one in evidence in sentences like: ‘This artwork expresses joy’. But this seems to be too narrow a conception of expression, although many philosophers, like Kant, wrote about the expression of aesthetic ideas, and these are not mere feelings. Much art is expressive, but it is not the case that all art is expressive of emotion. A great deal of twentieth-century art is preoccupied with ideas, rather than emotions.

Relation of representation to art is an old and enduring process. Art is the imprint of life upon our consciousness, and a facet of truth projected within a particular framework of understanding. Already with Plato and Aristotle, we are in a situation where imitation and resemblance were considered to be the main factors in art. This lasted well into the late nineteenth century, when philosophers became increasingly aware of art and aesthetics as less concerned with imitation or resemblance and more concerned with what the works of art are about. Works of art by Picasso, Tarkovski and Duchamp are still about something. Ready-made and found objects such as Fountain (1917) and In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915) possess special qualities.

They have semantic content, and the artist intended them to mean something. Even avant-garde works of art that defy interpretation have a subject, and mandate interpretation. On the other hand, pure orchestral music and non-representational architecture seem to resist a definition of art. There is much art that is about anything. Pure decoration is another example. Such artworks can be simply beautiful, ‘beneath interpretation’, and ‘solely in virtue of the perceptual impact they make on us’. According to Carroll, representation-type theories of art are inadequate to address all possible cases, much art is indeed representational, and visual art is especially likely to be representational.


Visual images have great emotional power to entertain, educate, and persuade the viewers. Every image that is put on public consumption entails a great responsibility in that sense. Thinking in art is the goal of aesthetic education. While aesthetics as a concept is surrounded by some ambiguity, much of it emanates from the very nature of aesthetics itself. Aesthetics deals with how viewers interpret the nature of art and why they respond to art as they do. The ambiguous and problematic issues related to aesthetics emanate from variable sense. Aesthetic study of images deals with the phenomenological and cultural dimension of artistic experience.

Symbols may stand or refer to other things. Symbolic power in art is immense, and one of the most striking features of the mind is true acceptance and use of things as symbols standing for other things. Nelson Goodman considered the idea of art media as symbol systems, which differ from natural languages in that they are non-discursive and are capable of being replete with significance. The use of these systems to create meanings is governed by rules, which are mostly intuitive and natural, but are also partly conventional. In this view, artistic thinking is the processing of the terms of a symbol system, creating significance and following the appropriate rules.

We should think of art and aesthetics as an open concept, one whose boundaries could never be finally drawn and whose future could not be predicted. Aesthetics deals with the variable nature of art, and involves contested concepts. Artistic meanings, functions, and forms are adjustable to changing individual and social contingencies. Theory of art as a contested concept is based on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who argued that no one trait can be found in common among some categories of meaning and for some types of objects and activities that are called art. One theory can’t sufficiently explain art for all times and all places. Artistic meanings, functions, and forms are adjustable to changing individual and social contingencies.

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Dr. Jarmo Valkola is associate professor in Baltic Film and Media Studies at the Media School, Tallinn University, Estonia, and associate professor at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland. He is a visiting professor at Lapland University and Jyväskylä University (Finland). He is the author of Perceiving the Visual in Cinema: Semantic Approaches to Film Form and Meaning (1993), Visual Communication and Dimensions of Editing (2003), Cognition and Visuality (2004), and co-editor in Cinema hongrois: Le temps at l'histoire (Sorbonne, 2004), and The Illuminating Traveler: Expressions of the Ineffability of the Sublime (2008).

contact: Jarmo.Valkola@gmail.com



Valkola - Art and Aesthetics of the Image