Abstract

Systematic aesthetics, as initiated by Hegel, begins by determining the universal features of the actuality of beauty in the work of art, artistic creation, and the reception of art. As such, these features are ingredient in all further forms of art and every individual art. Yet, as merely universal determinations of art, they themselves do not differentiate whatever particular artforms and individual arts there may be. Indeed, if any candidate for a universal constituent of art were peculiar to a particular form or individual branch of art, it would disqualify itself as an element in the account of art in general. Conversely, a particular mode of artistic creation may necessarily incorporate those general desiderata that make something an object of art, but an artform's particularity must reside in something more, just as what distinguishes one individual art from another must lie beyond the constitutive elements common to every work of art, every artistic creation, and every aesthetic awareness.