Cross-cultural creativity — aesthetics across traditions

Every aesthetic tradition is an inherited answer to the question of what makes something beautiful, which means to study aesthetics across cultures is to discover how various and how contested that answer has always been. The encounter with an unfamiliar tradition does not merely expand one's tastes but disturbs one's assumptions — revealing that what seemed natural or obvious in one's own tradition is in fact particular, chosen, a specific historical response to the question of beauty. This disturbance is the beginning of genuine aesthetic education.