In my opinion, if I don't like to look at something, I don't consider it art for me. It might be art for someone else, though.

"Aesthetics" is just a fancy word for "beauty". Everybody has their own notion of what is beautiful. The only value in reading other people's notions is to learn how to go about defining/refining your own for yourself. What makes something aesthetic, is different for each different thing. That which makes a plate of food aesthetic (before you uglify it by chomping on it before swallowing it down in your spit) is different from what makes an item of clothing aesthetic. Aesthetics is (not "are") important to everything in life, not just to art. Again, back to that plate of food. No matter how tasty and nutritional food is, will you even try to eat it if on the plate it looked like what it's going to look like after you have chewed it up in your mouth and slavered it with spit? No, nobody would, because it is all-important for food on the plate to look aesthetically appealing before anyone will want to eat it. Food in hospitals and prisons excluded. In hospitals "they" figure you're dying anyway, so why bother with a life-giving thing like aesthetics. In prison, you're there to be punished, and so they punish you extra by deliberately and spitefully and maliciously making the food look particularly ugly.