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To evaluate a picture as a picture is to evaluate it with respect to a feature essential to pictures. An aesthetic evaluation of a picture is one which is bound up with perceptual experience. On this account, aesthetic evaluations imply or are implied by cognitive or moral evaluations. The account is anti-formalist.

This chapter presents a synthesis of the discussions in the preceding chapters. It argues that in cases of art appreciation, aesthetic judgements become more weighty or take on a greater critical significance, when they are based on an understanding of the object of appreciation. If this is correct, then Functional Beauty, construed in the ‘internal’ sense, has a central position in aesthetic appreciation and evaluation. For the proper function of an object plays a key explanatory role with respect to that object, such that to grasp the function is to grasp something fundamental about the object. Thus, an appreciation of the apparent fitness of a shark, or an aeroplane, or a courthouse captures something more significant about the aesthetic character of that object than does appreciation of its colour, its pattern, its shininess, or its imposing grandeur. If this line of thought is on the right track, then rather than being just one further, and possibly marginal, element in the aesthetic character of functional things, Functional Beauty may occupy a central and primary place in all of our aesthetic experience.

This chapter reviews and rejects arguments offered in support of the opinion that the reasons offered in favour of strong aesthetic evaluations (‘this work is good’) cannot be sufficiently strong logically to entail their truth. In summary the arguments are: there is an unbridgeable gap between facts and values; evaluations are disguised ‘ought’ statements that could not follow from ‘is’ statements; criticism is concerned with conveying perceptually based experiences of the work rather than beliefs about it; there can be no general rules of artistic value because we value works of art for what makes each unique; the creativity of artists transcends the possibility of rules concerning art in general; and generalizations about the dependence of aesthetic value on the occurrence of any given set of aesthetic properties are always defeasible. None of these positions succeed in showing that reasoning in aesthetics has a distinctive, non-deductive character.

The scientific study of aesthetic experience through the examination of the neural correlates of sensory and motor responses works of art and to other visual images has thrived during the last decade. The neural substrate of embodied responses to works of art, and to visual images more generally, has been the object of much attention. This research, however, has tended to sidestep the question of aesthetic preference and rating, and the neural correlates of contextual influences on such ratings. Responses in the domain of perception–action coupling have provided useful and important evidence for the role of somatic and emotional responses in viewers’ engagement with works of art. Nevertheless, the degree to which they form the basis of evaluation, ranking, and even judgment remains unclear. In this chapter we concentrate on the respective roles of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during aesthetic evaluation, particularly the aesthetic evaluation of visual works of art. Activity in these areas is modulated by external contextual pressures on viewing. The roles of ACC, hippocampal and striatal connections in the process of rating and evaluating works of visual art, and the relationship between expert and non-expert responses, are also discussed.

According to aesthetic formalism, only formal properties are relevant to aesthetic evaluation—all aesthetically relevant properties are formal properties. The chapter argues that although formalism is not tenable, we can give an account of the properties relevant to aesthetic evaluation that captures the formalist intuitions without falling prey to the influential objections against formalism. It calls this account semi-formalism. According to the semi-formalist, the properties relevant to aesthetic evaluation are semi-formal properties—aesthetically relevant properties are semi-formal properties. And semi-formal properties are very different from and more inclusive than formal ones: they are properties that depend constitutively on formal properties.