<P> Artists such as Hirschhorn have indicated that there are too many exceptions to Dutton's categories . For example, the installations of the contemporary artist Thomas Hirschhorn deliberately eschew technical virtuosity . People can appreciate a Renaissance Madonna for aesthetic reasons, but such objects often had (and sometimes still have) specific devotional functions . "Rules of composition" that might be read into Duchamp's Fountain or John Cage's 4 ′ 33" do not locate the works in a recognizable style (or certainly not a style recognizable at the time of the works' realization). Moreover, some of Dutton's categories seem too broad: a physicist might entertain hypothetical worlds in his / her imagination in the course of formulating a theory . Another problem is that Dutton's categories seek to universalize traditional European notions of aesthetics and art forgetting that, as André Malraux and others have pointed out, there have been large numbers of cultures in which such ideas (including the idea "art" itself) were non-existent . </P> <P> Aesthetic ethics refers to the idea that human conduct and behaviour ought to be governed by that which is beautiful and attractive . John Dewey has pointed out that the unity of aesthetics and ethics is in fact reflected in our understanding of behaviour being "fair"--the word having a double meaning of attractive and morally acceptable . More recently, James Page has suggested that aesthetic ethics might be taken to form a philosophical rationale for peace education . </P> <P> During the first half of the twentieth century, a significant shift to general aesthetic theory took place which attempted to apply aesthetic theory between various forms of art, including the literary arts and the visual arts, to each other . This resulted in the rise of the New Criticism school and debate concerning the intentional fallacy . At issue was the question of whether the aesthetic intentions of the artist in creating the work of art, whatever its specific form, should be associated with the criticism and evaluation of the final product of the work of art, or, if the work of art should be evaluated on its own merits independent of the intentions of the artist . </P> <P> In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work . For Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting . </P>

The field of philosophy called aesthetics asked the question