Here goes: Aesthetic Theory is a posthumous book by German philosopher Theodore Adorno and is one of the most important works on aesthetics in 20th century philosophy. In it, he combines elements from Kant, Hegel and Marx. From Kant's 1790 work, Critique of Judgement, he draws on the idea of the Sublime and the notion that art has formal autonomy (which Adorno modifies). From Hegel, he takes a dialectical understanding of the ultimate goal or aim of art, and from Marx he approaches art as being inseparable from society as a whole.

He shows how art has a semi-autonomous 'truth-content' (a la Kant), but one that is always the product and embodiment of unresolved contradictions within the larger social fabric. (a la Hegel, and more so Marx).

Returning to the NVidia article at the root of this thread, this passage pops out as problematic (certainly for Adorno, but also in general): "In our case, we use supervised machine learning, with a dataset of photographs pre-categorized as aesthetically pleasing or not." There is a real sense of question-begging going on here. And Adorno would say that this approach forecloses the very fact that the definitional boundaries of these categories are constantly shifting and lack any real social stability.

edit: links.... http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/aesthetic-theo... http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#4 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/