Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) Illustrated Edition

After reading this short introduction I found myself puzzled about what an aesthetic experience is, what it is about, and why one might want to have such an experience in the first place.I did gather from the book that an aesthetic experience sometimes, but not always, involves "free and open ended attention," but this turns out to be just a fancy way of describing "savoring" the overall qualities of an experience without a particular goal in mind.According to the author, aesthetic experience does not pertain to any objective quality of the thing one pays attention to. Any aesthetic judgment one might have is entirely due to bias (cultural bias, exposure bias, and so on.) So no aesthetic judgement is any better than any other. Apparently just about anything can be the subject of an aesthetic experience (it certainly doesn't have to be "art") and any value one gets from the experience (pleasure, insight, complexity, sense of formal beauty, etc.) is purely subjective if not downright pretentious. Aesthetic discussions are pointless (unless you are, say, a snobbish teenager talking about his favorite band) because they erroneously assign value to one thing over another.So, apparently, aesthetics is nothing more that really liking something for personal reasons and then paying attention it. Other more complex ideas about Aesthetics, (like say Kant's) are touched on briefly and offhandedly dismissed. I finished the book wondering, "if that's all there is to aesthetics, why bother having a special word for it? Why write a book about it at all?"In a sense, the book did do its job, because I immediately bought a longer book (And Introduction to Aesthetics by Gordon Graham) that investigates the rich and sumptuous array of aesthetic theories that differ from the stultifying one presented in this introduction.

The central thesis, that aesthetic values and tastes are culture-bound, I believe to be fallacious. This little book reviews some interesting observations supporting its point of view, but neglects all that would contradict it.

The usual overly simplistic two dimensional woke drivel with more than a touch of ressentiment I'm sure.

Waste iftime nothing new learned from this book except aesthetics as a sustained versus temporary effect.