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With apologies to Sir Walter Scott: O what a tangled web we crawled through to find a blog on aesthetics — finally, a site called philosophy of art — when most of the aestheticians we met wouldn’t know what to say unless that web produced spider veins.

And there is one of the vagaries of modern English: Where an aesthetician once was someone versed in the philosophy and nature of beauty and artistic expression, the word has been co-opted to mean specialists in skin care and cosmetics. And they have co-opted the Internet: Of the top 100 Google listings for ‘aesthetician blogs,’ only two qualify in the traditional sense, and philosophy of art was a blogroll spinoff from one of them.

Well, the crawl was worth it, I think, although you may not agree.

Aesthetic theory is not to be approached with an ‘I don’t know about art but I know what I like’ attitude. It’s complex, convoluted and confusing. And although philosophy of art is a collaboration of different thinkers, often in an extended dialogue, it is well-written. Which is why it’s now on our blogroll.

Here’s a sample from the most recent entry I found — a Feb. 25 essay by Robert Kraut, an Ohio State professor in metaphysics, aesthetic theory and philosophy of language, pondering the “alleged universality of art”:

Over the years, I’ve found that most of my introductory aesthetics students reject this claim of ‘universality’: They are more struck by differences than similarities among artworks of different cultures and ages. But the logic of the situation is notoriously complex: With sufficient cleverness, it is always possible to find a set of invariants uniting any given class of data. The question is whether those invariants are non-trivial, and whether they are of importance to someone interested in ‘the essence’ of art . . . Moreover, even if there exist artworks with ‘universal and eternal’ appeal, it is not clear (to me) why such features should be valorized as essential to art.

In a comment three days later, Jerome Langguth, an adjunct philosophy instructor from Cincinnati, suggested there is a universality to the arts:

Maybe what is universal is not some set of features that art-objects or experiences might or might not have in common, but the human capacity to become enthusiastic about opening oneself to the pleasures of the new.

Kraut acknowledges in an entry about a year earlier, Feb. 21, 2006, that aesthetic theory is not easy:

One reason aesthetic theory is so difficult — and, in my opinion (I’m not alone in this), less well developed than areas like philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, theory of knowledge and metaphysics — is that genuine artworld practitioners (ED: the artists themselves) tend not to wield the formidable technical machinery of theory construction employed by those in the sciences or in analytic philosophy. But, of course, the reverse deficiency also holds: Artists wield other sorts of machinery that theorists lack. It goes both ways.

I don’t understand everything the aestheticians are talking about, but it reminds me of being a kid and listening to grownups talking intelligently about a subject some of which I can barely grasp and the rest of which seems a wonderful mystery that I someday may understand.

The content of philosophy of art can be dense, but the postings are sporadic. Feb. 25, in fact, is the most recent I found, and although the site is two years old, there are entries in only 10 of those 24 months.

I found the site through Philosophy Talk, a companion blog to a West Coast radio program of the same name on which a variety of philosophical topics are discussed.

– Sid Leavitt