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Aesthetics is the subject that tries to understand the arts in a broad and fundamental way. Many persons study one of the arts, such as painting, music, or poetry. Aesthetics studies all the arts, from all countries and from all periods of history. It tries to organize out knowledge of them systematically.

Aesthetics studies how artists imagine, create, and perform works of art; how people use, enjoy, and criticize art; and what happens in their minds when they look at paintings, listen to music, or read poetry, and understand what they see or hear. It also studies how they feel about art – why they like some works and not others, and how art can affect their moods, beliefs and attitudes toward life. One of the effects of art is the feeling that some things are beautiful and others are ugly. For many years, scholars regarded the stud of beauty as the whole or main problem of aesthetics. Now the subject has broadened to include many other aspects of art in relation to the life around it. One main task is to collect, organize, and interpret accurate information about the arts and aesthetic experience. Another is to help people judge the aims and values of art more intelligently.

Aesthetics is usually regarded as a branch of philosophy, along with logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. It is the youngest branch to be given its own name, which was first used in 1700s. But philosophers from Plato to the present have discussed the philosophy of art. They sometimes established hard and fast rules about what artists should create and what people should like. However, many of these rules have been abandoned. Since the late 1800s, writers have been developing aesthetics into more independent field of study.