SOURCE: Mortensen, Preben. “Shaftesbury and the Morality of Art Appreciation.” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4 (October 1994): 631-50.

In this essay, Mortensen examines Shaftesbury's notion of aesthetic disinterestedness and his moral defense of art appreciation.

It is central to our Western conception of art that art has its value in itself and not just as a vehicle for, say, moral or religious enlightenment. According to this idea of the autonomy of art, when we contemplate art, we adopt a specific “aesthetic attitude” which serves, as it were, to bracket whatever practical, moral, religious, political, or other concerns we may have, and we attend to the object in an aesthetic manner only. This way of attending to works of art (or other objects) is sometimes called disinterested contemplation. Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713) is often considered the first to call attention to the phenomenon of “disinterested perception” as it relates...