Aesthetics is the domain of philosophy concerned with art, both man-made and naturally occurring. It raises questions such as, "What is art?," "What makes some art better than others?," and "Where does an artwork begin and end?" A possible answer to the first is that artwork is "a candidate for appreciation." An artifact which has become such a candidate is said to have had this status conferred on it by trustees of the 'art-world.' If so, then how do they judge candidacy? Once a candidate, how do they decide if it is good art? Is there some universal characteristic that could be used to make objective judgments, such as beauty or sublimity that the artwork represents, or at least points to? But it seems to be a subjective matter whether someone likes it or not. On the other hand, there are those pieces of artwork on which a vast majority can agree are good, making the matter seem intersubjective.
A sculpture-of-a-cat sits chained to a railing, or, is it a sculpture-of-a-chained-cat? Knowing whether or not the chain is intended to be part of the sculpture changes the way in which the piece is appreciated. A different meaning emerges. While the properties of the physical object remains unchanged, the properties of the object as an aesthetic object are dependent on the intentions of the artist, as well as on the viewer's conceptual interaction with it.
Aesthetics is more than the mere observation of art. It is an active response to it. Artwork images seem to have more than representational roles. They generate a supervening structure of concepts which transcend the base medium. It is to the supervening structure that we have an aesthetic response. The material substrate, before being exhibited as an aesthetic object, arouses no such response. Many philosophers concur that ‘reduction’ is not possible (i.e. that an aesthetic response cannot be flattened into the red squares or gray smudges that compose the painting) even if intersubjectively experienced as sublime. In Danto's words, art is a "transfiguration of the commonplace."
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