 The prevailing answer to the normative question is aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is value because things having it give pleasure when experienced. Aesthetic hedonism achieved prominence in the 19th century, roughly when aesthetic formalism did. Schopenhauer played a pivotal role in bringing it to prominence by reassigning disinterested pleasure from the role it had been playing in aesthetic judgment to the role of grounding aesthetic value (Schopenhauer 1818 [1969], 195–200). Bentham (1789, ch. 4) and Mill (1863 [2001]; ch. 2) arguably played larger roles by popularizing value hedonism, that is, the view that pleasure is the ground of all value. But whereas value hedonism no longer holds much sway in ethics, and Schopenhauer no longer exerts much influence in aesthetics, aesthetic hedonism has held its ground. The explanation presumably has to do with the apparent ease with which aesthetic hedonism explains why we seek out objects of aesthetic value. Any adequate answer to the normative question must meet what we may call the normative constraint, that is, it must plausibly identify what a thing’s having aesthetic value gives us reason to do. Aesthetic hedonism, locating that reason in the pleasure taken in experiencing aesthetically valuable objects, does this in the clearest possible terms.