Comparison among natural beauty function among traditional art and modern art based on Coomaraswami's idea

Expressing the nature of the function of beauty in traditional art and its comparison with the applications in the modern art enable today’s human and artists to effectively exploit aesthetics in the works of art with an expanded mentality. Undoubtedly, an important approach for explaining the function of traditional and modern art belongs to traditionalists, including the ideas of Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Ceylonese philosopher. The present study aimed to evaluate and explain the viewpoints of Ananda Coomaraswamy regarding the function of beauty in the traditional art and its comparison with the modern art. According to the results, in the position of a traditionalist philosopher, Coomaraswamy adopted a unique approach toward arts and aesthetics, the distinction of which lies in its transcendentalism and spiritualism. Furthermore, Coomaraswamy believed in a functional difference between the types of beauty in the traditional and modern art, as in the beauty that aimed to obtain the most desirable expression and the beauty that merely followed the others’ satisfaction and self-expression. Not only does Coomaraswamy argue with the functions of beauty in the modern art, he also severely criticizes this concept. Nevertheless, Coomaraswamy does not totally dismiss the pleasure of aesthetics in works of art, but rather disagrees with the misconception that the ultimate goal of arts is the centralization of pleasure and the artist’s individualism. The current study was conducted with a descriptive-analytical design.