Deranty, Jean-Philippe. "Existentialist Aesthetics." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY June 26, 2009.

Many of the philosophers commonly described as “existentialist” have made original and decisive contributions to aesthetic thinking. In most cases, a substantial involvement in artistic practice (as novelists, playwrights or musicians) nourished their thinking on aesthetic experience. This is true already of two of the major philosophers who inspired 20th century existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. For reasons of space, however, this entry is restricted to 20th century thinkers who at one point or another accepted the tag “existentialist” as an accurate characterisation of their thinking, and who have made the most significant contributions to aesthetics: Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism owes its name to its emphasis on “existence”. For all the thinkers mentioned above, regardless of their differences, existence indicates the special way in which human beings are in the world, in contrast with other beings. For the existentialists, the human being is “more” than what it is: not only does the human being know that it is but, on the basis of this fundamental knowledge, this being can choose how it will “use” its own being, and thus how it will relate to the world. “Existence” is thus closely related to freedom in the sense of an active engagement in the world. This metaphysical theory regarding human freedom leads into a distinct approach to ontology, i.e., the study of the different ways of being. This ontological aspect of existentialism ties it to aesthetic considerations. Existentialist thinkers believe that, under certain conditions, freedom grants the human being the capacity of revealing essential features of the world and of the beings in it. Since artistic practice is one of the prime examples of free human activity, it is therefore also one of the privileged modes of revealing what the world is about. However, since most of the existentialists followed Nietzsche in the conviction that “God is dead,” art's power of revelation is to a large extent devoted to expressing the absurdity of the human condition. For the existentialists, the world is no longer hospitable to our human desire for meaning and order. This ontological approach to art underpins some of the most distinctive features of existentialist aesthetics. Because it views art in terms of “revelation,” it favors representative art and is suspicious of formalist avant-gardes. And because it grounds expressive capacity on the notion of human freedom, it demands that artistic representation be strongly informed by ethical and political concerns. This is why at times existentialist aesthetics can appear out of touch with the aesthetic avant-gardes of the 20th century. Some of the existentialists wrote substantial analyses about different art forms and how they can be compared, elaborating something like a “system of the arts” similar to that of classical aesthetics. All the existentialist thinkers, with the exception of Merleau-Ponty, thought that the form that best enabled the revelatory potential of art was the theatre, followed by the novel. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-existentialist/.