The need to distinguish Art from Beauty is a painful discovery. Because of the abstract nature of securing definitions and criteria for the aesthetic, it is a long and sometimes painful process of philosophical thinking to realize that you must separate these two terms. Kant had the same revelation when he coined the term “sublime” to indicate a higher level of aesthetic experience that went beyond art. The confusing part of this discovery is not helped by society’s habit of talking about many kinds of Art as being beautiful on such a frequent basis. To say “This ___ is beautiful” can sometimes be thrown into a conversation without much thought. . Beautiful here is used as an adjective clearly describing the object of attention as worthy of being called Beautiful. It is the common usage of the term beautiful that leads to confusion and many times encourages a non-reflective attitude. I have mentioned this in previous posts and I hope to elaborate a little here.
The terms Art and Beauty have become blurred. Art itself has criteria that objects would first need to qualify as Art and then they may also qualify as Beautiful -- if they share elements with God’s Glory. Not everything that man creates is Art, though everything that God creates is beautiful. Even Christians have misused these terms and turned them around incorrectly. I have seen church signs that read, “Art is man’s creation, Creation is God’s Art.” This sounds like a lovely saying and may sound very true to the untrained aesthetic mind; however, I will show that this phrase implies the predication of Art to Creation, implying that the logical extension of Art is equal or greater than Creation - which clearly shares God’s quality of Beauty. But art never has greater logical extension than beauty.
Art has also traditionally been limited to man-made objects. Here is the wall that most philosophers eventually run into when trying to describe art and beauty in a related context. The problem with confusing beauty and art is that if beauty is limited to art, what do you do about the awesomeness of Creation and how can you include those elements in an aesthetic criterion? This is a huge puzzle and German Philosopher Immanuel Kant “solved” the stumbling block by using the term “sublime” to identify the kind of aesthetic response that went beyond man’s creation. You’ll even hear people use the term sublime -- It was a sublime experience and chances are they do not even know what it means…You see both art and beauty involve aesthetic responses. In fact, they cry out for an aesthetic response and are a necessary component to each! So when you are trying to study aesthetics it is easy to confuse art and beauty. The stumbling block in the academic study of Aesthetics usually happens when you encounter God’s creation and it is difficult to define the difference between these two aesthetic responses in logical terms.
Therefore beauty cannot be limited within the extension of art. Art might share in beauty, but beauty is not confined within art. That is the difference. The puzzle is not such a difficult one, if you are a Christian. Here is my point and here is where we will avoid the stumbling block of misused terms. The truth of the matter is that beauty, not art, is a quality of God - and it is this declaration that you will not hear from secular philosophers, nor will children learn this from a public institution.
Why is this important? When you study the development of thought and how we learn, the mental acts involved in an aesthetic response will be developed before ethical thought. If a child is not exposed to nature or God's poetry in scripture, he will need to develop his aesthetic response in a different way. Usually this can happen when exposed to man-made art including music and literature. The aesthetic response is not as developed, but it is still important that it develops in some fashion. Now do you begin to understand my concern when the secular world tries to remove art and literature from your child?. A poor mental development which begins with a lack of aesthetic experience and snowballs to incompetent ethical judgments will result in the development of our young people.
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