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Essay / David Hume, On the Standard of Taste - 533
IntroductionAesthetics is, to put it simply, the study of art, beauty and the judgments that result from them. As society tends not to view art as a functional activity, this branch of study may seem unnecessary; In fact, a well-known esthete and self-proclaimed professor of aesthetics, Oscar Wilde, said: “All art is quite useless.” However this sentence is misleading, and the same man also said “Aestheticism is a search for the signs of beauty. It is the science of beauty through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to put it more precisely, the search for the secret of life. Now this seems more interesting and more important than the study of a "useless" subject, and whether or not the study of aesthetics plays an overtly "functional" role in our lives, it certainly appeals to our humanity , to our common sense of beauty and capacity for aesthetic experience, and can potentially deepen our understanding of this phenomenon which has existed since the dawn of man. To explain it in a less broad and less lofty way, aesthetics asks questions like “what is art? ??”, “...