Aesthetics and the Creative Response

What is truth? said Jesting Pilate. And, in the same breath, we could ask: “What is beauty?” (But we should stay for the answer.)

The appreciation of beauty is ultimately an emotional, subjective act, but the detailed and complete apprehension of beauty, especially in its complex forms such as music, art, and wine requires a body of knowledge and a set of objective observations. The two go hand in hand. Appreciation without knowledge may be pleasurable, but it is shallow. Apprehension without appreciation may be detailed, but it ignores our humanity and the truth of emotion.

We look to critics not just to analyze, but to make aesthetic judgments, and their assessments are necessarily born of the human condition: we have both perceptions and emotions, and we can no more divorce the two than we can give up our humanity. The real question is whose perceptions and emotions do we trust?

Subjectivity, Aesthetics, and the Evaluation of Wine – http://www.vinography.com

The intrinsic quality of any wine is capable of striking through the senses and into the mind of the taster with a feeling of novelty and discovery. Aesthetically, we are looking at the unified complex of characteristics which constitute “the outward reflection of the inner nature of a thing” – its individual essence. This feeling for intrinsic quality, for the unified pattern of essential characteristics, is the special mark of the superior taster, whose business is to select these characteristics and organise them into significant form.

Effectively, as superior tasters, we are trying to capture in language the rich and revealing “oneness” of the wine, a Platonic notion of intrinsic pattern or design. This involves bringing forth the sensation of the interior structure or inscape of the wine– an illumination, a sudden perception of deeper pattern, order and unity which gives meaning to the objective description. So much of tasting is done at the margins of perception; it is a prosaic, phenomenological, almost ascetic activity that tabulates the extrinsic attributes of the wine when intuition and sensuality would provide an even richer understanding of the wine.

I would like this creative response to replace, to a certain extent, the evaluative aspect of wine tasting with its need to mark wine by rote.  Our aesthetic judgements are prisoners to the spectral hierarchy of good/bad; it is as if the wine qua wine is less important than the validation of the critics.