Most of this course has been about art. But many people's deepest aesthetic experiences happen outdoors: a mountain range at dawn, a storm rolling over the sea. And the boundaries of art keep moving as new machines arrive, first the camera and now artificial intelligence. This level looks at both edges of the subject.
The beauty of nature
Kant gave natural beauty a special standing. Art is made to please; nature's beauty seems to happen freely, as if the world were somehow suited to us. Kant held that taking a direct interest in the beauty of nature is a mark of a good soul. G. W. F. Hegel later disagreed, ranking the beauty of art higher because art is born of the human spirit.
The sublime
Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry (1757) separated the beautiful from the sublime. Beauty, he argued, is small, smooth and gentle. The sublime is vast, dark and powerful: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible ... is a source of the sublime." For Burke, the sublime is a thrilling awe at things vast, powerful or dangerous, felt from a position of safety. Kant added a twist: before a storm at sea we feel physically tiny, yet our reason can think of infinity, and so we sense our own dignity as rational beings.
How should we appreciate nature?
Eighteenth century tourists carried a small tinted mirror called a Claude glass, named after the painter Claude Lorrain, and turned their backs on the view to see it framed like a painting. The picturesque was an eighteenth century taste for scenery that looked like a landscape painting, popularized by the writer William Gilpin. Critics say this treats nature as a stage set.
In 1979 the philosopher Allen Carlson argued for a different model. Carlson's scientific cognitivism holds that appreciating nature properly requires knowing what natural things are, as science describes them. A whale admired as a giant fish is misperceived; seen as a mammal, it is seen rightly. Critics reply that this makes appreciation too intellectual: a child can love a sunset with no knowledge of how air scatters light. The debate matters for environmental ethics, since people often protect what they have learned to love.
Photography: art or machine?
When photography was announced in 1839, critics asked whether a picture made by a machine could be art. William Henry Fox Talbot called his book of photographs The Pencil of Nature (1844), as if nature drew itself. The French poet Charles Baudelaire, in 1859, scorned photography's claims and said it should be the humble servant of the sciences and arts. Early critics doubted photography was art because a machine, not a human hand, seemed to make the image. Photographers answered by showing how choices of subject, framing, light, timing and printing express a vision. Alfred Stieglitz campaigned for decades to win photography a place in museums.
In 1935 the critic Walter Benjamin argued that mass reproduction changes art itself. Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction weakens the aura, the unique presence of an original work, while also bringing art to far more people.
AI-generated art
The newest form of the debate concerns images, music and text produced with artificial intelligence. In 2018 a portrait generated by an algorithm, titled Edmond de Belamy, sold at Christie's in New York for $432,500. In 2022 Jason M. Allen won the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair with an image made using the program Midjourney, which angered many artists.
The case for counting such work as art: people choose prompts, select among hundreds of outputs and edit the results, much as photographers choose among frames, and the old case against photography sounds strikingly similar. The case against has several parts. From expression theory comes the objection that a program has no felt experience to pass on. The systems were trained on millions of artists' works, often without consent or pay. And writing a prompt may be more like commissioning a work than making one.
The law has taken a position on one piece of this. United States courts and the Copyright Office have held that copyright requires human authorship, so a purely machine-generated image cannot be registered, though human selection, arrangement and editing can be. Rules differ in other countries and are still changing. Behind the theory lie human stakes: illustrators fear for their livelihoods, while others welcome tools that let people without training make images.
Worked example: the prize at the fair
Return to Allen's winning image, Théâtre D'opéra Spatial. He reported running hundreds of prompts, then choosing and retouching the best. Imitation theory asks what it represents: a grand, hazy hall with robed figures, so it qualifies. Formalism looks only at composition and color, and the judges took it seriously on those terms. Expression theory asks whose feeling it passes on: Allen's choices, perhaps, but the brushwork is the program's. The cluster account counts criteria: strong form and some skill in selection, little craft of the hand. The Copyright Office refused to register the image as submitted, and Allen challenged the refusal in court. Whether the ribbon was deserved depends on which theory you hold, which is why the oldest questions in aesthetics have suddenly become practical again.