Here is my "vague summary" definition of "aesthetic experience"
(idiosyncratic though it may be): a satisfying or significantly pleasurable
response, sustantially but not necessarily solely affective, to a stimulus
(painting, poem, play, photograph or natural event - add your own
favourite).
I agree that definition is difficult, but that is not, for me, a reason to
make no effort. (Look at the fine work of President Bush to manage national
debt.)
Geoff C
From: William Conger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Expertise and aesthetic experience
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2008 08:27:27 -0700 (PDT)
Most philosophers say that whatever the aesthetic "experience" is, it
cannot be fully explicated because to do that is to describe it in terms
separate from the experience. Experience is a flow, a continuum, always
mixed with a variety of feelings and memories in addition to the moment at
hand. How is it possible to isolate "an experience" except in vague
summary? Thus I think the aesthetic experience, a faulty term, is
ineffable. In fact, I suspect we could say the same about any sort of
experience whatsoever. We need to use a language to reconstruct the
presumed experience and that has its own experiental or even aesthetic
evocative and therefore constructive aspects. In short, the word we use to
describe our experience is also an experience and thus has its own defining
impact.
Because no experience can be replicated by a language I frankly have no
idea what an aesthetic experience is. Some episodes of my ongoing
experiental life seem to be more surprising and fascinating, and remind me
of the "oceanic" metaphor, like out of body fantasies, but, really, nothing
is adequately both necessary and sufficient to describe any experience
without making it anew, and false.
I am one who answered in the affirmative regarding the "aesthetic" benefit
of learning from critics. I use the word critic expansively here, and
apply it a range of writers from writers like Baudelaire to art scholars
like TJ Clark, among hundreds of others. Why? These people have given me
deeper access to art, enabling me to experience it far more fully than I
might have otherwise. Sometimes, their prose alone is so enlightening that
it becomes fused, as it were, with the artworks they discuss. And isn't
art something that should attract and reflect the distilled experiences
expressed by its audiences? When it begins life, an artwork is empty, or
meaningless, as all things are, and attains vitality through the content
its audiences create and vicariously extend to it.
WC
--- On Sat, 10/11/08, Chris Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> From: Chris Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: Expertise and aesthetic experience
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Saturday, October 11, 2008, 9:05 AM
> As Derek once asked, "What *is* an "aesthetic
> experience"?" --- and perhaps
> not everyone here would say that they had such things - or
> even if we all
> would -- it's quite likely that we use the phrase
> differently.
>
> As Mando would say -- it's a "Wow!" kind of
> experience -- and perhaps we would
> all agree -- but beyond that ?
>
> For example both Cheerskep and I like to watch sports --
> but I would never
> call any of those experiences "aesthetic" -
> however exciting/intense they may
> be.
>
> Last week -- I saw an animated mural at our local natural
> history museum. It
> made me feel like I was immersed in a primeval forest and
> about to get
> trampled by a herd of woolly mammoth -- a very big WoW! for
> me -- but I would
> save the term "aesthetic experience" for what I
> felt from some of the
> Southwest Indian painted jars in another part of the
> exhibit.
>
> Perhaps no one else here would make that kind of
> distinction.
>
> Though I still agree with Cheerskep that expert advice
> has never caused me
> to derive an aesthetic experience from a work that did not
> occasion it
> before.
>
> (and I'm still waiting to read a specific counter
> example)
>
>
>
>
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