Aesthetics is usually considered to be beauty/ugliness, but recent research in “spiritual” areas shows that pure aesthetics is really use of the physical universe “formulas” (ie. ways to contruct things) without participating in the designated Game of the physical universe (the game could be described as “achieving goals”). The dichotomy of beauty/ugliness is actually aesthetics PLUS game considerations. This is obvious from the fact that what is considered “beautiful” changes according to health concerns of a particular age . . . a few hundred years ago, a beautiful woman was a woman who was fat, because fat women had enough food to eat, where-as more recently beauty is a thin woman who is healthier than someone overweight. Yet at both times, facial symtry is considered beautiful, because certain genetic diseases lead to unsymetrical faces. So beauty is aesthetics plus aligment with physical universe game-goals (usually the goal of survival).

Generally, “fine art” focusses on aesthetics and popular imagery focusses on emotions more than aesthetics. This should be obvious if one compares the popular wildlife posters featured in a recent blog post with fine art wildlife images (such as the majority of the artists listed under “wildlife art by artist”).

Of course, the distinction is somewhat blurred . . . fine art can sometimes focus on emotions as well as aesthetics, such as :-

Stubbs,George

Landseer,E. H.

. . . the “romantic” art period was very much about emotions. Also, fine art can, at times, be popular (often due to lower classes emulating higher classes in society).

To give an example from another art form . . . compare early Pink Floyd with The Beatles. The Beatles is much more popular, and is very much emotions, but early Pink Floyd is much more about the aesthetics even though similar sounds and notes used in both and people who don’t know what aesthetics is would say they sound very nearly “the same”.

Another spiritual fact is that there are precisely delimited levels of humans . . . the caste system used in India (although implemented incorrectly, and full of false data) is a lot more correct than the rest of the world saying everyone is the same. There are humans with a spirit, and humans with no spirit (this is made clear in original yoga data, and is confirmed precisely by recent research) . . . a human body with no spirit has no contact with aesthetics at all. Of course there are humans with a spirit who ignore their spirit and so ignore aesthetics! What this means in practice is that what is popular in the arts will be more about emotions, where as “fine art” (in whatever medium . . . the term could be applied to music just as correctly as visual arts) is focussing on aesthetics (some recent Fine Art is anti-aesthetic, which is still focussing on aesthetics by opposing it!).

Comments welcome, of course . . . I am sure not everyone will agree with what I say here