Aesthetic judgment involves the appreciation of objects that are inherently beautiful, while taste involves the appreciation of objects in relation to ourselves.
There’s a paradox in all of this, Gurstein notes: “In the quarrel over forgeries, those who love beauty for its own sake are sophisticated aesthetes and those who care more for the work’s pedigree than its aesthetic qualities are philistines.” But in today’s culture wars over sensational contemporary art such as Hirst’s, “those who expect to find beauty are now dismissed as philistine, while those who appreciate objects without aesthetic attributes and for reasons that have nothing to do with beauty turn out to be sophisticated, art-world insiders.”
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