Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-28 0

In November 2024 a banana, stuck to a wall with a strip of gray duct tape, sold at auction in New York for about $6.2 million. The buyer then ate it. Many people laughed, some were furious, and nearly everyone had an opinion about whether it was art. That argument is much older than the banana. Plato worried that painters traffic in illusions, Hume wondered how anyone could be wrong about taste, and Kant puzzled over why we expect others to agree when we call a thing beautiful.

Aesthetics takes those everyday arguments seriously. You will meet the best case for beauty being real and the best case for it being in the eye of the beholder, find out why people pay to cry at sad films, and weigh whether a song means what its writer meant. You will test old theories on hard new cases, from propaganda films and Japanese tea bowls to prize-winning images made with AI, and come away able to give reasons for your taste instead of just having it.

Levels

  1. 1 1. What Aesthetics Asks 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. Hume and Kant: Can Taste Be Right? 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. What Makes Something Art? 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Why We Love Sad Stories 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Interpretation and the Artist's Intention 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Taste, Culture and Objectivity 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Art and Morality 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Nature's Beauty and New Forms 5-question quiz

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