----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [5] [5] Re: Beauty? I think not!
Mike, can you give some examples? (which, unlike the ones given in your
previous post, involve human agency)
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I take an aesthetic experience to be any experience where there is a
significant focusing on the self-conscious of experience. An aesthetic
experience is experience qua experience. Whenever we are asked to answer
the question, "What is it like to have this experience?" we are invited into
an aesthetic experience. Any experience for its own sake or "as an end in
itself" is an aesthetic experience.
Many of the aesthetic theories from Kant to Beardsley refer to some kind of
"detachment" or "disinterestedness" in an aesthetic experience. What they
are referring to, IMO, is the disentanglement art has from the everyday
purposes of living. Experiencing art serves no other purpose than the
experience itself.
So, what I look to in a communicative act is whether the communication is
instrumental (non-art) or is asking me what it is like to experience the
communication.
If I describe my pain to my doctor, I am not interested in how she
experiences the information, I just want her to cure me. My communication
has an end beyond the experience itself. (not art)
If I need to give directions to someone and draw a map of the area, the
diagram is instrumental. (not art)
If I draw a sketch of the area, not for any useful reason, but because I
believe the experience of viewing the sketch is valuable in and of itself,
then I have made art.
The one thing all art has in common is that someone, somewhere felt that the
experience of the object was valuable in and of itself. People may not find
it valuable, in which case the object is not good art, but I focus on the
intention, not the results.
Obviously there will be mixed cases such as square plate gourmet dishes.
Artwork or Nourishment. But, even here I submit that the controversy is
less troublesome than attempting to come up with a list of qualities of an
experience that allow an object to be counted as art.
Mike Mallory
