How Aesthetic Standards Change

Representation, Taste, and Why Artistic Representation Has Become a Culture War Battleground

Something strange happens when ancient Greek statues are “restored” to color: they stop looking beautiful.

The philosopher Ralph S. Weir offers a compelling explanation. We don’t recoil from painted reconstructions because ancient taste was radically different from ours, but because the reconstructions are simply bad—garish, flat, clumsily painted, and inattentive to form.

When ancient art survives with its color intact, or when statues appear in frescoes and mosaics, the use of color is restrained and sensitive to sculptural volume.

The problem isn’t polychromy itself. It’s poor execution, compounded by archaeological literalism that treats pigment residue as data rather than as the starting point for artistic judgment.

Weir’s argument opens onto much larger questions. How and why do aesthetic standards change? Who decides what counts as good, beautiful, or legitimate art? And once we take history seriously, can we still make meaningful judgments across deep cultural and temporal distance, or has historical awareness stripped us of the right to judge at all?

Those questions now sit squarely within today’s culture wars. When the Trump administration proposed requiring classical or traditional styles for federal buildings, the backlash was immediate and intense—not just politically, but aesthetically.

To many architects and critics, classicism wasn’t merely unfashionable; it was illegitimate, reactionary, even authoritarian.

Yet the dominant alternatives—modernist and postmodernist architecture—are no less ideological. Glass boxes, brutalist concrete, fragmented forms, and the rejection of ornament encode their own values: abstraction, efficiency, rupture with tradition, democratic anti-monumentality, ironic distance from power.

The issue is not whether aesthetics is political—it always is—but whether we can distinguish between the political uses of form and aesthetic quality, and whether we can judge in ways that are historically informed without being historically trapped.

Why Art History Isn’t a Story of Progress Toward Realism

One of the most persistent—and misleading—ideas about art history is that representation steadily evolves toward realism: that Egyptian reliefs were crude attempts at depicting the human figure, later improved by Greek sculpture, perfected in Renaissance perspective, and finally transcended by modern abstraction.

That story isn’t just incomplete. It’s fundamentally wrong. For artistic representation has its own logic.

Around 1900, Alois Riegl challenged earlier evolutionary accounts of art with his idea of Kunstwollen—”artistic will.” Every historical period has its own way of organizing visual experience—its own assumptions about what images are for and how they should work. What changes over time is not technical ability, but artistic intentions.

Egyptian art offers the clearest example. Egyptian artists did not fail to depict bodies realistically. They deliberately chose not to. Their familiar composite figures—heads in profile, torsos frontal, legs striding sideways—were governed by symbolic clarity and metaphysical order, not optical appearance.

The goal was completeness and permanence. Images were meant to endure eternally, not capture fleeting moments of perception.

Riegl showed something similar in late Roman art. What earlier scholars dismissed as “decline” was actually a coherent shift in priorities—from sculptural depth and tactile form to surface pattern and optical effect.

This wasn’t incompetence. It was a different visual logic.

Ernst Gombrich extended this argument in Art and Illusion. Representation is not simple an imitation of nature. Artists work with inherited conventions—schemata—and gradually adjust them in response to observation. But those schemata are always culturally specific. There is no “innocent eye,” no purely natural way of seeing. Perception itself is shaped by expectations and conventions.

Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Persian, Yoruba, and Renaissance European art are not stages along a single developmental path. They are alternative solutions to the problem of representation, each internally coherent, each grounded in different assumptions about reality, knowledge, and meaning.

Hans Belting pushed this argument even further by questioning the very category of “art.” In Likeness and Presence, he argues that medieval images were not aesthetic objects at all, but presences—cult images that participated in the reality they depicted.

Icons were not pictures of Christ; they were sites where Christ became present. The shift from cult image to autonomous artwork was not progress. It was a transformation in what images were understood to do.

Egyptian Art and the Logic of Eternity

Egyptian artists could be extraordinarily naturalistic when circumstances demanded—as in the Amarna period, or in tomb paintings of animals, plants, and everyday labor that display keen observation and technical skill.

But formal portraits of pharaohs followed different rules. Figures had to be complete, hierarchical, stable, and eternal. Size reflected social importance, not distance in space. Frontal poses resisted contingency and decay. These conventions expressed maat—cosmic order, divine kingship, cyclical time.

As John Baines has shown, to depict a pharaoh in a fleeting, foreshortened pose would have subjected divinity to the instability of human perception. That wouldn’t simply be a technical failure. It was metaphysically unacceptable.

Whitney Davis’s work on the canonical tradition shows that Egyptian style was maintained for three millennia not due to stagnation, but through disciplined transmission. This was not unsophisticated art. It was art serving radically different ends than later naturalism.

Greek Naturalism Was a Rupture

Greek naturalism, when it emerged in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, was not the next step in inevitable evolution. It was a revolution—a conscious reorientation toward proportion, anatomical accuracy, balance, and embodied presence.

Greek naturalism reflected specific values: confidence in human reason, celebration of the body as a site of excellence, and belief in kosmos as both aesthetic and moral order. As J.J. Pollitt shows in Art and Experience in Classical Greece, developments like contrapposto—the natural shift of weight that creates implied movement—coincide with philosophical inquiries into motion, change, and appearance.

And Greek naturalism was never mere realism. As Michael Squire emphasizes, it was idealization. Polykleitos’s Canon prescribed mathematical ratios for the perfect body. Sculptures represented types—the athlete, the god, the hero—not individuals.

This wasn’t photography avant la lettre. It was philosophy made visible.

Non-Western Alternatives: African Sculpture and Mesoamerican Art

The limits of evolutionary stories become even clearer beyond Europe—especially in traditions long dismissed as “primitive.”

Traditional African sculpture often privileges expressive force, spiritual potency, and social function over anatomical accuracy. As Suzanne Preston Blier explains, a Fon bocio—a power figure—is not trying and failing to look like a human body. It is designed to concentrate spiritual energy (ase): to protect, to heal, to curse, to bind oaths.

Elongation, abstraction, and distortion aren’t mistakes. They are techniques for intensifying presence.

Robert Farris Thompson makes a similar point about Kongo nkisi figures. Their bulging eyes, open mouths, and aggressive postures are visual signs of activated power. The nails driven into the body record contracts, vows, or acts of justice. These sculptures don’t represent power. They are expressions of power.

The same logic applies to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art. Olmec, Maya, and Aztec artists compressed bodies into stylized, often blocky or geometric forms to express cosmology, calendrical time, political authority, and ritual identity. As Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn argue, these works are not failed attempts at realism but highly refined symbolic languages, fully comprehensible to initiated viewers.

As David Summers argues in Real Spaces, all art negotiates tensions between surface and depth, pattern and volume, flatness and illusion. Different cultures resolve those tensions differently, based on their metaphysical and social priorities.

There is no single scale on which Egyptian, Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Yoruba art can be ranked. They are incommensurable—not because judgment is impossible, but because they are solving different problems.

Paradigm Shifts, Not Taste Drift

If representation doesn’t evolve in a straight line, how does it change? Through paradigm shifts—deep transformations in worldview that reorganize what can be seen, what counts as skillful depiction, and what images are for.

Medieval Christian art offers a striking example. From late antiquity through the Romanesque period, artists deliberately rejected classical naturalism. Byzantine icons flattened space, elongated figures, and used gold backgrounds not to depict physical light but to evoke divine radiance beyond nature.

This was not a loss of skill. Classical models were well known. It was a deliberate choice. As Hans Belting shows, medieval images functioned within a sacramental economy. An icon of the Virgin wasn’t a picture of Mary; it was a site of presence, a point of access for prayer. Too much realism would have undermined that function.

As Sixten Ringbom explains, medieval artists worked in symbolic rather than optical space. Gold meant eternity, not sky. Size marked spiritual importance, not distance.

Meyer Schapiro showed that Romanesque sculpture—often dismissed as crude—was exquisitely sensitive to narrative clarity and expressive force. The elongated prophets at Chartres aren’t bad anatomy; they are columns turned into bodies, mediating between stone and spirit.

Renaissance Illusionism: Perspective and the Individual

The Renaissance “return” to naturalism wasn’t simply the recovery of classical ideals. It was a new synthesis—classical learning fused with Christian theology, scientific observation with metaphysics, and technical mastery with emphasis on individual genius.

Linear perspective, developed by Brunelleschi and theorized by Alberti, created a new paradigm: the painting as a window onto unified, rationally ordered space. As Erwin Panofsky famously argued, perspective wasn’t just neutral technique. It was a symbolic form that encoded Renaissance assumptions about vision, subjectivity, and reality.

Perspective assumes a single, fixed viewpoint—a knowing observer from whom the world becomes coherent. This aligns with Renaissance humanism’s emphasis on the autonomous individual and the intelligibility of nature through reason.

Medieval art, in contrast, had used multiple viewpoints and symbolic hierarchies. Renaissance art replaced this with a world organized around the eye of the observer.

Portraiture sharpened this shift. From Jan van Eyck to Holbein, portraits didn’t just record faces. As Joanna Woods-Marsden shows, they constructed identities—asserting status, character, learning, and moral worth.

This required not just technical skill, but a new metaphysics of selfhood: the belief that individuals possess coherent, enduring identities worth fixing in paint.

19th-Century Realism: The Politics of the Ordinary

The 19th century introduced yet another paradigm shift: the elevation of ordinary life as a serious artistic subject. Millet’s peasants, Courbet’s laborers, and Manet’s barmaids weren’t just genre scenes. They challenged the academic hierarchy that placed myth and history above everyday experience.

As T.J. Clark argues in The Painting of Modern Life, this shift wasn’t only about subject matter. It was also formal. Manet’s flatness, abrupt compositions, and refusal of illusion disrupted bourgeois expectations. Realism wasn’t simple mimesis. It was a claim about whose lives mattered enough to be seen.

The Realists were making an argument: that a peasant’s labor or a prostitute’s gaze deserved the same aesthetic seriousness as martyrdom or mythological scenes. That argument was political—but it worked through form, not slogans.

Modernist Abstraction: When Representation Breaks Down

Modernist abstraction didn’t abandon representation because artists ran out of technical options. Abstraction emerged from a deeper conviction: the world no longer seemed representable using inherited visual languages.

As Arthur Danto argued in After the End of Art, modernism marked the end of art understood as a single story of progress toward ever more accurate representation. What followed was radical pluralism—a world in which artists worked in radically different styles, each justified by its own theories and criteria.

Kandinsky believed that pure color and form could communicate spiritual truths more directly than representational images. Mondrian sought universal harmony through strict geometry. Malevich’s Black Square was meant as a zero point—a rejection of Western pictorial tradition in favor of pure sensation.

These gestures were responses to World War I, industrialization, the collapse of traditional religious authority, and the rise of photography and film.

If cameras could capture appearances more efficiently than painters, what was painting for? Abstract artists answered: painting should reveal what photography couldn’t—structure, spirit, essence, the unseen.

But abstraction created a problem. If painting no longer represented anything, how could it be judged? If every work set its own rules, how could one abstract painting be better than another? This is the dilemma Danto identified. Once art became fully self-reflexive—capable of being anything—it lost the shared standards that once made judgment possible.

Understanding Paradigm Shifts

What unites these transformations—from Egyptian to Greek, medieval to Renaissance, realist to abstract—is that they involve paradigmatic shifts, not incremental modifications. Each reorganizes the entire field of representation.

Michel Foucault’s idea of epistemes is helpful. Just as knowledge systems determine what counts as truth or evidence, representational regimes determine what can be seen, what counts as skillful depiction, and what images are for.

This helps explain why polychrome reconstructions of classical statues often feel wrong in ways that medieval polychrome sculpture or Egyptian statuary does not.

We can appreciate medieval polychromy because it operates within a coherent system—symbolic, transcendent, integrated with architecture and ritual. Egyptian color works for the same reason: flat, hieratic, symbolic, embedded in cosmological order.

Modern reconstructions of classical statues violate both the classical paradigm they claim to restore and the modern perceptual expectations we bring to them. They flatten sculptural form, ignore tonal subtlety, and treat pigment as forensic evidence rather than expressive medium. They don’t belong fully to any representational world.

They aren’t challengingly foreign. They’re incoherent—and that incoherence is easy to sense.

Aesthetic judgment can operate across paradigms, even if it can never escape history entirely. We can recognize when a work succeeds brilliantly within its own system, even when that system is not ours. And we can recognize failure when paradigms are confused or execution falls short.

Taste, Power, and the Problem of Judgment

A hard question remains: how do we separate genuine aesthetic judgment from the exercise of social power?

In the Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argued that aesthetic judgments are subjective—they express feeling, not concepts—yet they make a claim on others. When I say something is beautiful, I’m not just reporting a preference. I’m implicitly asking you to agree.

This makes aesthetic judgment different from factual claims and from personal likes or dislikes. For Kant, beauty claims universal validity because it draws on shared human perceptual capacities, not on private desire or practical use. That’s why he insisted that aesthetic pleasure is “disinterested”—we enjoy beauty without wanting to possess, use, or exploit the object.

But this account has always been vulnerable to sociological critique.

Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction delivered that critique with force. Taste, he argued, is not disinterested at all. It is shaped by education, upbringing, and class position. What passes for “refined” taste is often just cultural capital—skills and preferences acquired through social advantage.

Bourdieu showed that aesthetic preferences track class remarkably closely. Elites favor abstraction, formal difficulty, and intellectual distance. Working-class audiences prefer narrative clarity, emotional immediacy, and functional beauty. These differences aren’t random. They help mark social boundaries.

Taste signals who belongs and who doesn’t. When someone insists that abstract expressionism is superior to Norman Rockwell, they may be making an aesthetic claim—but they’re also asserting cultural authority.

Bourdieu’s idea of habitus helps explain why this feels natural. People raised in cultivated environments absorb aesthetic dispositions effortlessly. What looks like innate sensitivity is often inherited advantage. Ease is mistaken for superiority.

Bourdieu’s critique is largely right about how aesthetic judgment functions socially. Taste does operate as cultural capital. Aesthetic claims do often mask power. But it doesn’t follow that aesthetic qualities themselves are illusions, or that skill and achievement are nothing more than ideological effects.

As Richard Shusterman argues in Pragmatist Aesthetics, Bourdieu risks reducing aesthetics entirely to sociology. Works of art aren’t just markers of distinction. They are also achievements—material, formal, expressive accomplishments that can be perceived and evaluated, even if our perception is always shaped by culture.

Richard Sennett makes a similar point in The Craftsman. Skill, attention to material, sensitivity to form, and the discipline that comes from long practice are real and perceptible. A master Yoruba carver, a Renaissance painter, and a Japanese ceramicist all display forms of material intelligence that viewers can recognize, even without full cultural fluency.

We may not grasp everything such works mean—but we can often tell when something is well made.

This suggests that aesthetic judgment is neither purely subjective, as Kant sometimes implies, nor purely social, as Bourdieu sometimes suggests. It is historically situated, but not arbitrary. We judge from particular positions—but what we judge includes real qualities that resist complete reduction to social function.

Neuroaesthetics and the Biology of Response

Recent work in neuroaesthetics complicates the picture further. Researchers such as Semir Zeki and V.S. Ramachandran have identified neural patterns associated with aesthetic pleasure. Certain features—symmetry, balance, contrast, rhythmic repetition—tend to activate reward circuits in the brain.

This doesn’t rescue naive universalism. Cultural variation in taste is real and extensive. But it suggests that aesthetic response isn’t entirely learned. Some formal features may be broadly salient because of how human perception works.

Denis Dutton pushed this further in The Art Instinct, arguing that some aesthetic preferences may have evolutionary roots. These claims are speculative and don’t explain abstraction, irony, or conceptual art. But they do suggest that aesthetic judgment is anchored—however loosely—in embodied, neurological realities, even as culture shapes how those responses are interpreted.

Aesthetics and Power in the Present

All of this brings us back to politics—and to why debates about beauty, statues, and buildings now feel highly charged.

When the Trump administration proposed an executive order titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” which would have encouraged classical and traditional architectural styles, the American Institute of Architects called it a step backward.

The proposal explicitly rejected modernist and postmodernist styles that had dominated federal architecture since the 1960s. It invoked Jefferson, Greek Revival architecture, and neoclassical monumentality as embodiments of dignity, democracy, and civic order.

The controversy revealed a deeper conflict—not just about style, but about who gets to define aesthetic legitimacy.

The Case Against Mandated Classicism

Critics raised serious objections to the Trump order. American architectural history is plural—Gothic Revival, Romanesque, Art Deco, Prairie Style, International Modernism. Mandating classicism risks flattening that diversity.

Second, classicism carries ideological baggage. Its emphasis on symmetry, hierarchy, and monumentality has been used by authoritarian regimes—from Napoleon to Mussolini to Stalin.

Third, classical architecture is often associated with a narrow vision of American identity—elite, European, exclusionary.

Finally, much contemporary classicism is bad. It often amounts to thin pastiche—columns without craft, proportion without substance. Nostalgia without tradition easily becomes kitsch.

The Case Against Modernism

But modernism is no less ideological—and no less capable of failure.

Modernist architecture grew out of utopian ambitions: Le Corbusier’s “machine for living,” Bauhaus rationalism, the dream of redesigning society through form. In practice, these visions often produced housing projects and urban plans that isolated residents, erased communities, and generated environments people experienced as cold or hostile.

Modernism also cultivated its own aesthetic authoritarianism. Ornament, historical reference, and popular taste were dismissed as backward. Experts knew best. This was technocratic authority rather than political dictatorship—but it could feel just as coercive.

Many people experience modernist and brutalist buildings as ugly, alienating, or dehumanizing. That response isn’t simply ignorance. It reflects genuine affective reactions to spaces that prioritize abstraction, efficiency, and novelty over comfort, continuity, and meaning.

The Deeper Issue: Who Decides?

This conflict isn’t really about classical versus modern. It’s about who gets to decide what our built environments look like—and what values those environments express.

Mandating classicism is coercive. But the modernist establishment’s reflexive dismissal of traditional forms as illegitimate is also coercive. Both sides claim authority—one in the name of tradition and popular preference, the other in the name of expertise and progressive values.

What the controversy reveals is that aesthetic choice is never politically neutral. Buildings shape how we experience public life, what we remember, and what we value.

Let me offer a third position: pluralism plus judgment.

Neither mandated classicism nor entrenched modernism is defensible. What we need instead is aesthetic pluralism—recognition that different contexts, purposes, and communities call for different architectural languages, and that beauty is real but not singular.

Some principles cut across styles:

▪ Respect for human scale and bodily experience.

▪ Sensitivity to materials and craft.

▪ Thoughtful integration with surroundings.

▪ Attention to how buildings are actually used and lived in.

▪ Resistance to both nostalgic kitsch and technocratic brutality.

Buildings shouldn’t be judged by whether they are classical or modern, but by whether they succeed as architecture—whether they create humane, intelligible, and well-made environments that serve the people who inhabit them.

What the Statue Debate Reveals

The polychromy controversy exposes another problem: the uneasy relationship between historical accuracy and aesthetic responsibility.

Museums often present reconstructions of ancient polychromy as correctives to the “white marble myth.” They’re right about the facts: Greek and Roman statues were painted. The association of whiteness with classical beauty has real ideological and racial baggage, as scholars like Sarah Bond have shown.

But acknowledging those truths doesn’t absolve the reconstructions of aesthetic failure—and that failure matters.

Most polychrome reconstructions are deeply conjectural. Pigment analysis can identify traces of paint, but it can’t recover original hues, tonal gradations, or the skill with which color was applied. Those gaps are filled with educated guesses—shaped by modern software, conservation protocols, and museum practice.

The result is often flat and garish. Color is applied uniformly, without sensitivity to carved volume, light, or visual hierarchy. Pigment is treated as forensic evidence, not as artistic expression requiring judgment and restraint.

When viewers recoil from the colorized statues, they’re often told their reaction reflects ignorance—that ugliness is the point, proof of how alien ancient taste really was.

But this is an evasion. As Hans-Georg Gadamer argued, aesthetic experience is a form of understanding. Art addresses us and invites judgment. When experts present conjectural reconstructions while disclaiming responsibility for how they look, they undermine trust—not because they challenge taste, but because they refuse to acknowledge their own role as taste makers.

Judging Across Paradigms

If aesthetic paradigms are historically specific, how can we judge across them?

The answer isn’t that beauty is universal in some simple way. It’s that achievement can remain partially understandable across time. We can recognize the coherence of Egyptian figures without sharing Egyptian metaphysics. We can feel the power of a Yoruba mask without knowing its ritual use. We can be moved by Byzantine mosaics without believing their theology.

As Kendall Walton suggests, these responses involve imaginative participation—we enter, provisionally, into unfamiliar frameworks. We don’t need to be ancient Athenians to recognize that the Parthenon sculptures achieve something extraordinary. We need attention, historical knowledge, and willingness to recognize skill.

The polychrome reconstructions fail not because they are foreign, but because they are incoherent. They’re executed poorly. They mistake archaeological accuracy for artistic integrity. Ancient polychromy itself—as seen in frescoes, vase painting, and preserved works—shows restraint and formal intelligence. The reconstructions do not.

What’s Really at Stake

The culture wars over statues, buildings, and beauty aren’t really about columns or pigments. They’re about whether we’re allowed to say—without embarrassment or apology—that some forms are more humane, more intelligible, or more skillfully made than others.

Naive universalism pretends beauty is timeless and culture-free. It ignores history, power, and difference. Complete relativism dissolves judgment entirely, reducing beauty to preference or ideology and making serious discussion impossible.

What we need instead is historicist realism.

That means recognizing that aesthetic paradigms are historically specific—but not arbitrary. That judgment is situated—but still meaningful. That power matters—but doesn’t exhaust meaning. And that some works succeed more fully than others within their own traditions.

To historicize aesthetics responsibly is not to abandon judgment. Ancient Greek sculpture still moves us not because beauty is timeless or because we’re trapped by white marble myths, but because its makers achieved a synthesis of form, surface, and meaning that remains perceptible even across distance.

The failure of modern reconstructions isn’t that they reveal the past’s foreignness. It’s that they reveal how easily historical humility can slide into aesthetic abdication.

Aesthetic paradigms change. There is no inevitable progress. But neither is everything arbitrary.

To call something beautiful is to make a claim—contestable, arguable, and accountable. It’s also to affirm that form matters, that making is a kind of thinking, and that some achievements endure even after the worlds that produced them have passed.

That is a recognition that aesthetics is political—not because beauty always serves power, but because shaping the world and deciding what’s worth preserving belong to all of us.

The question “Who decides what looks good?” can’t be answered by timeless rules or sociological debunking alone. It can only be answered through ongoing, historically informed, aesthetically serious conversation about what we make—and what kind of world we want to live in.