estetik

Estetik is the field of study and reflection concerned with beauty, taste, art, and the judgments people make about aesthetic value. It examines how we experience beauty, why certain objects or performances are considered art, and how context, culture, emotion, and intention influence our perceptions. The scope includes philosophy of art, philosophy of perception, design, and everyday judgments about style and form.

Historically, estetik has roots in ancient philosophy but took its modern shape in the 18th century. The term was popularized by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who defined aesthetics as the science of sensory knowledge and taste. Immanuel Kant argued that aesthetic judgments are subjective yet claim universality, arising from the free play of imagination and understanding. Later thinkers such as Hume, Burke, Hegel, and contemporary scholars expanded the field to address the autonomy of art, the social dimensions of taste, and the relationship between perception and meaning.

Branches of estetik include the philosophy of art, the aesthetics of perception, environmental aesthetics, and applied aesthetics, which considers design, architecture, fashion, and multimedia. Empirical aesthetics uses psychological methods to study how people experience beauty and art. The discipline also intersects with ethics, politics, and technology, recognizing that aesthetic judgments are culturally situated and often shaped by broader values and power relations.

In Indonesian and several related languages, estetik is used both to denote the theory of aesthetics and the sense of beauty or stylistic quality in objects and environments.