Embodied Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
pp. 890-910
Author(s):  
Barbara Gail Montero
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Embodied Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Bodily Movements

Although great art frequently revers the body, bodily experience itself is traditionally excluded from the aesthetic realm. This tradition, however, is in tension with the experience of expert dancers who find intense aesthetic pleasure in the experience of their own bodily movements. How to resolve this tension is the goal of this chapter. More specifically, in contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ embodied aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as observers’ embodied aesthetic experience of seeing bodies move.

A Farewell to Art: Aesthetics as a Topic in Psychology and Neuroscience

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Skov ◽  
Marcos Nadal
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Behavioral Control ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Hedonic Value ◽  
Hedonic Valuation ◽  
Emotional Processes ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of

Empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics study two main issues: the valuation of sensory objects and art experience. These two issues are often treated as if they were intrinsically interrelated: Research on art experience focuses on how art elicits aesthetic pleasure, and research on valuation focuses on special categories of objects or emotional processes that determine the aesthetic experience. This entanglement hampers progress in empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics and limits their relevance to other domains of psychology and neuroscience. Substantial progress in these fields is possible only if research on aesthetics is disentangled from research on art. We define aesthetics as the study of how and why sensory stimuli acquire hedonic value. Under this definition, aesthetics becomes a fundamental topic for psychology and neuroscience because it links hedonics (the study of what hedonic valuation is in itself) and neuroeconomics (the study of how hedonic values are integrated into decision making and behavioral control). We also propose that this definition of aesthetics leads to concrete empirical questions, such as how perceptual information comes to engage value signals in the reward circuit or why different psychological and neurobiological factors elicit different appreciation events for identical sensory objects.

Historical Musicology and Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Julian Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The Body ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Key Terms ◽  
Conceptual Language

This chapter begins from the failure of both musicology and philosophy to grasp the aesthetic experience afforded by music. It argues instead for an approach that explores the gap between the sensuous particularity of musical thought and the kinds of language brought to it. This hinges on recognising that key terms are not absolute but historically constructed – issues of musical beauty, taste, expression, representation, meaning, ontology – and that the aesthetic experience of music resists the generality of conceptual language. It proposes four key issues for rethinking the relation of music and philosophy: (1) the persistence of the aesthetic (what is not reducible in music to either history or philosophy); (2) the restoration of the body (music as an embodied practice that resists being the object of language); (3) the particularity of listening; (4) the challenge of contemporary music to ahistorical ‘normative’ ideas about music.

scholarly journals AESTHETICAL EXPERIENCE AS PATHOLOGICAL DISCOURSES OF ABJECTION AND MELANCHOLIA IN THE BEKSINSKI' ART

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-59
Author(s):  
H.O. Verbivska
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Body ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Maternal Authority ◽  
First Time

This article tackles the issue of aesthetic experience from the pathologized everyday discourse viewpoint in the system of relations between I and symbolic order, where transgressed and close to symbolic death I is predominant. The stage, in which I, crossing the symbolic borders, stay readable, appears to be the process of continuous constituting the aesthetic experience and its transforming into the primordial a priori structure of everyday discourse. The problem lies deeply in the preserving of evanescent borders which are said to exist in the cultural palpability and simultaneously to be exiled from the system. The article exemplifies pathological discourses by referring to the Beksinski' works, namely his numerous ways of articulating the ineffable. However, articulated ineffable, similarly to such culturally conditioned reactions as abjection and melancholia, declares double death of the discursive subject: the first time when the separation from primordial presymbolic world takes place and the second time during problematizing the symbolic borders and paradoxical immortalization concerning postulated frontiers. The aim of this article is to dig out kaleidoscope of images and sub-images from Beksinski' works through the motive of crucifixion resulting in the specific value of Christ's body and chimerical things inside the dehumanized catastrophic space. It is demonstrated how pathological discourse of melancholia could be intertwined with the discourse of abjection in the common point of transgressing the limits, making the symbolic space full of details indicating the risk of Ego being disintegrated, staying inside the transgressed limits as constituting aesthetical experience. Inexplicability of terrible post-apocalyptic world is readable via symbolic coordinates insofar as the main primal object (the body of Christ) occurs to be banished. Appearing of aesthetic experience is paralleled to the stages of psychosexual development in the existence of symbolic being where in opposition to classical freudism maternal authority is accentuated. That's how Kristevan style of psychoanalytic ruminations looks like.

scholarly journals Fostering the Aesthetic Pleasure: The Effect of Verbal Description on Aesthetic Appreciation of Ambiguous and Unambiguous Artworks

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 144
Author(s):  
Emanuela Mari ◽  
Alessandro Quaglieri ◽  
Giulia Lausi ◽  
Maddalena Boccia ◽  
Alessandra Pizzo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Total Sample ◽  
Verbal Description ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Audio Description ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Retest Session

Background: Aesthetic experience begins through an intentional shift from automatic visual perceptual processing to an aesthetic state of mind that is evidently directed towards sensory experience. In the present study, we investigated whether portrait descriptions affect the aesthetic pleasure of both ambiguous (i.e., Arcimboldo’s portraits) and unambiguous portraits (i.e., Renaissance portraits). Method: A total sample of 86 participants were recruited and completed both a baseline and a retest session. In the retest session, we implemented a sample audio description for each portrait. The portraits were described by three types of treatment, namely global, local, and historical descriptions. Results: During the retest session, aesthetic pleasure was higher than the baseline. Both the local and the historical treatments improved the aesthetic appreciation of ambiguous portraits; instead, the global and the historical treatment improved aesthetic appreciation of Renaissance portraits during the retest session. Additionally, we found that the response times were slower in the retest session. Conclusion: taken together, these findings suggest that aesthetic preference was affected by the description of an artwork, likely due to a better knowledge of the painting, which prompts a more accurate (and slower) reading of the artwork.

«Oj, skal vi gjøre dette i dag?» Lærerstudenter og lærerutdanneres meningsdanning i en estetisk workshop med fokus på skapende dans

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
Birgitte Nordahl Husebye ◽  
Kristine Høeg Karlsen
Keyword(s):  
Student Teachers ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Aesthetic Quality ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Bodily Expression ◽  
Physical Education Students ◽  
Group Interviews ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract This study aim to investigate the perceptions and experiences of student teachers and teacher-educators when participating in an interdisciplinary workshop in which they were to create and explore their own expressive movements and others’ bodily expression. The study employed a qualitative approach, and in order to acquire access to the informants’ lifeworld and their immediate and mediated experiences, open focus group interviews were conducted after the workshop. We base our analysis on inductive coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2015), which then were interpreted in the light of Dewey’s (1934) understanding of the aesthetic experience and Merleau-Ponty’s (1994) phenomenological notion of the body. Our analysis demonstrates that the informants are unfamiliar with using bodily expression, nor do they believe that they have the knowledge or skills needed to create movement and dance, which may explain why they struggle to engage with the creative process. By observing the dances others had created, the informants discovered that there was no right or wrong way of expressing movement. They became a little more open and the experience acquired what Dewey (1934) describes as an aesthetic quality. The music students and teacher-educators are inquisitive and open to using these kinds of creative processes in school. The physical education students have a more reserved attitude to the inclusion of dance, confirming findings in other studies. Based on these results there seems to be a need to create more room for processes that aim for aesthetic abilities in teaching-education.

Modern Parody

2019 ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Leonard Diepeveen
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Aesthetic Pleasure ◽  
The Aesthetic

Beginning with an account of a parody of Spectra (itself a hoax movement intended to expose the fraudulence of imagism), this chapter examines how actual frauds, hoaxes, and parodies—as attempts to unmask modernism’s fraudulent ambitions—performed something essential to a successful fraud: a mimicry of sincerity. Along with this mimicry, parodies and hoaxes interpreted what modernism’s features were, arguing as well that modernism was easy to replicate, and therefore insincere. As part of this analysis, the chapter questions whether truly new or avant-garde works are capable of being parodied when their features are not understood. The goal of these frauds, hoaxes, and parodies was not to articulate an affect of aesthetic pleasure, but to make the aesthetic experience of modernism one of recognition, credulity, common sense—a silent appeal to ideology, and a moment of unmasking.

scholarly journals Fenomenologia i performatyka gestu w tańcu współczesnym

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Fazan
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Postmodern Dance ◽  
The Aesthetic

The paper covers the problem of gestural expression and the role of the body in the aesthetic experience analysed in the Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of art and Erika Fischer-Lichte’s theory of performance. The author compiles these theorists’ conclusions and contextualizes them in the field of modern and postmodern dance. The ultimate goal is to analyse the artists’ statements in the context of formulated conclusions and syntheses. In summary, the author draws attention to current aesthetic research on dance and pinpoints the benefits of philosophical  phenomenological) interest in the modern and postmodern dance.

scholarly journals La sensación virtual. La imaginación sensorial como facultad de la experiencia estética

2021 ◽  
pp. 219
Author(s):  
Mario Teodoro Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Sensory Imagination

A partir del pensamiento del filósofo francés Maurice Merleau-Ponty (y refiriendo diversos pensadores de distintas tradiciones filosóficas) ofrezco aquí una descripción de lo que llamo “sensación virtual” e “imaginación sensorial” para caracterizar ciertas capacidades de nuestra experiencia corporal que permiten superar la oposición entre percepción e imaginación, y hacen posible la experiencia estética, el arte, la cultura, y la vida humana y el pensamiento en general.From the thought of the French phi-losopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and referring to different thinkers of different philosophical traditions) I offer here a description of what I call “virtual sensation” and “sensory imagination” to characterize certain capacities of our bodily experience, which allow us to overcome the opposition between perception and imagination, and make possible the aesthetic experience, art, culture, and human life and thinking in general.

Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience

Projections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittorio Gallese
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Third Culture ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
New Model ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Brain

The naturalization of the aesthetic experience of film and art can benefit from the contribution of neuroscience because we can investigate empirically the concepts we use when referring to it and what they are made of at the level of description of the brain-body. The neuroscientific subpersonal level of description is necessary but not sufficient, unless it is coupled with a full appreciation of the tight relationship that the brain entertains with the body and the world. In this article, I will discuss aspects of Murray Smith’s proposal on the aesthetic experience of art and film as presented in his Film, Art, and the Third Culture against the background of a new model of perception and imagination: embodied simulation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document