Artistic style plays a critical role in our commerce with artworks. Artworks are artifacts that mediate a complex communicative exchange
between artists and consumers, or more broadly among members of an artistic community. Artistic style is a perceptible quality of the
appearance of an artwork that enables us to recognize it as belonging to one category of art or another. Artistic style refers, in the most
general sense, to patterns of regularity in the manner in which artworks are made, in the way their subject matter has been rendered, that
facilitate grouping them together into categories by period, geography, schools, movements, artist, or period in an artist’s life. This is
important. Categories of art are defined by sets of normative conventions governing the production and appreciation of works of different
types. Artistic style is a cue to a set of recipes for engaging with a work, for understanding what it means to have rendered its subject
manner in a particular way, and for evaluating whether what has been done has been done well or poorly. Knowledge of categories of
art provides access to the point, purpose, or meaning of a work … to read more

 William P. Seeley
Visiting Scholar in Psychology, Boston College
Catherine A. Buell
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Fitchburg State University
Ricky J. Sethi
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Fitchburg State University / The American Society for Aesthetics ©2018

courtesy of  The American Society of Aesthetics ©2018