From: GEOFF CREALOCK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Expertise and aesthetic experience
To: [email protected]
Date: Saturday, October 11, 2008, 3:18 PM
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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