steepholm

I think that your artistic/aesthetic distinction is a useful one for many purposes, and is probably a good way of staying sane about this whole issue! But of course it's not an absolute distinction, especially when aesthetics and artistic intent combine, as in the case of rhetoric, for example. Thus I think it would be quite difficult to separate an aesthetic appreciation of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as a piece of cinematography from an acknowledgement of its rhetorical intent and effect. It works through an aesthetics of the viscera. The beauty of a sword can be quite abstract by comparison.