Essay 2: The Aesthetics of Taste

The essay is about the song Rise Up, by Andra Day

Evaluate the work of your choice, critically analyzing how it meets THREE of the Aesthetic Principles, excluding principle 8. Try to employ effective analogy, descriptions, and relevant comparisons to works that are already considered classic to help make your point.

The three Aesthetic Principles to use are:

1. Objects are aesthetically valuable if they are meaningful or teach us truths. For example, Aristotle says that tragic plays teach us general truths about the human condition in a dramatic way that cannot be matched by real-life experience. Many people believe art shows us truths that are usually hidden from us by practical concerns of daily life.
2. Objects are aesthetically valuable if they have the capacity to help bring about social or political change. For instance, Abraham Lincoln commented that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed to the antislavery movement, which resulted in the Civil War.
3. Objects are aesthetically valuable if they have the capacity to produce certain emotions we value, at least when the emotion is brought about by art rather than life. In the Poetics, Aristotle observes that we welcome the feelings of fear created in us by frightening dramas, whereas in everyday life fear is an experience we would rather avoid. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud offers another version of this principle: While we enjoy art, we permit ourselves to have feelings so subversive that we have to repress them to function in everyday life.

4 full pages

Classical Format

MLA Format

including correct paper formatting, in-text citation, and works cited (if necessary).

Include the language of aesthetics in an organic fashion.

I attached an article about the song that you can use but feel free to explore elsewhere. You may also talk about the artist herself, but mostly the song.

PLEASE have a good hook and a clear thesis statement.