The General Impact of Context on Aesthetic Experience

Author(s):  
Matthew Pelowski ◽  
Eva Specker

This chapter discusses the general impact of context on the aesthetic experience. It is designed to anticipate the other chapters’ discussions of context’s specific areas—the social, the physical or institutional, information and framing, museums, background or personality-related features. Here, the authors offer a more general consideration discussing key aspects such as: What even is context? How can it best be thought about? What are the key issues that might be considered? And, especially, how can it be generally integrated into present knowledge of models of aesthetic processing experience? Beginning with the interest in context throughout the history of aesthetics, the chapter builds a presentation of empirical approaches and especially theory, focusing on context’s main layers and points of influence. It then discusses how key context issues might be considered in models of aesthetic processing, with the goal of providing a framework for better approaching context aspects in this book and in one’s own future studies. This is also interspersed with what the authors consider to be some of the more intriguing studies in order to spur readers’ thinking about the potential for studying context. The chapter concludes with some major issues, some candidates for future consideration, and suggestions for further reading and education.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Specker ◽  
Eiko I. Fried ◽  
Raphael Rosenberg ◽  
Helmut Leder

In recent years, understanding psychological constructs as network processes has gained considerable traction in the social sciences. In this paper, we propose the aesthetic effects network (AEN) as a novel way to conceptualize aesthetic experience. The AEN represents an associative process where having one association leads to the next association, generating an overall aesthetic experience. In art theory, associations of this kind are referred to as aesthetic effects. The AEN provides an explicit account of a specific cognitive process involved in aesthetic experience. We first outline the AEN and discuss empirical results (Study 1, N=255) to explore what can be gained from this approach. Second, in Study 2 (N=133, pre-registered) we follow calls in the literature to substantiate network theories by using an experimental manipulation, and found evidence in favor of the AEN over other alternatives. The AEN provides a basis for future studies that can apply a network perspective to different aesthetic experiences and processes. This perspective takes a process-based approach to aesthetic experience, where aesthetic experience is represented as an active interaction between viewer and artwork. If we want to understand how people experience art, it is central to know why people have different experiences with the same artworks, and, also, why people have similar experiences when looking at different artworks. Our proposed network perspective offers a new way to approach and potentially answer these questions.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Dana Seitler

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called “first wave” of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle “the homosexual was now a species,” along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an “endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.”...


Author(s):  
Ana Teresa Contier ◽  
Laila Torres

The aesthetic experience has been discussed throughout the history of mankind by philosophers and art historians, becoming a universal part of human experience, which leads us to some great interdisciplinary questions. It has been the subject of study by neuroscientists and neuro-psychologists since the 2000s. This recent evolution of neurology studies in the field of art, is due to in vivo brain imaging techniques, especially functional neuroimaging. Furthermore, recent research has provided evidence of cognitive interaction during the perception of an artwork indicating that the perceptual experience of art is not merely a passive one. This article reviews important studies in neuroaesthectics of visual art that point out that the aesthetic experience is related to the distribution in the neural architecture, suggesting the involvement of sensory-motor areas, emotional centers, reward system, memory and language.


Author(s):  
Julian Johnson

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
M.V. Ermolaeva ◽  
D.V. Lubovsky

We consider a wide range of emotional disorders that occur as a result of meeting with works of art in places of significant cultural value, denominated as Florence syndrome. The analysis of the syndrome is conducted in two directions stemming from the psychotherapeutic approach developed by F.E. Vasiluk: the analysis of events’ sense (clinical and psychological nature of the syndrome), and the analysis of the existential content of experiences as a process of giving meaning to events. We analyze the descriptions of the Florence syndrome in the works of G. Magherini. Different versions of the syndrome are interpreted from the point of view of M. Klein’s theory of object relations. It is shown that the existential essence of this syndrome consists in the difficulty of accepting the social situation of adult development and challenges of uncertainty and complexity. We suggest that the existential nature of this syndrome is associated with the expectation of meeting with the beautiful, with an aesthetic situation that will change the person’s life for the better without an effort of will, without difficult preliminary work on learning the language of art and without further understanding of the aesthetic experience received. In conclusion, we analyze the most important theme of A. Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris”, that is, returning to childhood, to the origins, to the foundations of being, to a spiritual rebirth.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 786
Author(s):  
Josette Alves de Souza Monzani ◽  
Mario Sergio Righetti

Resumo: Procura-se apontar de que modo os procedimentos estéticos do diretor franco-argentino Gaspar Noé acabam por realizar uma proposta de cinematografia radical que estabelece uma tensão no compartilhamento sensorial entre o corpo da tela, o corpo da câmera e o corpo do espectador. Carne (1991) e Sozinho Contra Todos (1998) narram a história de vida do Açougueiro, um cidadão à margem da sociedade metropolitana francesa, marcada por represamentos afetivos que o comprimem e levam a cometer ações bestiais marcadas por ‘enganos’, equívocos que o prejudicarão para sempre.O corpo cinematográfico de Noé faz uso da imagem e do som hápticos, trilhando um caminho batailleano - através da transgressão, da sensorialidade e da experimentação do abjeto -, e através deles busca induzir no espectador o que denominamos afeto carnal e corporeidade imanente como forma de pontuar as questões sociais e éticas propostas pelo diretor. Abstract: It is tried to point out how the aesthetic procedures of the French-Argentine director Gaspar Noé end up making a proposal of radical cinematography that establishes a tension in the sensorial sharing among the body of the screen, the body of the camera and the body of the spectator. Meat (1991) and I Stand Alone (1998) chronicle the life history of the Butcher, a citizen on the fringes of French metropolitan society, marked by affective imprisonments that compel him to commit bestial actions marked by ‘mistakes’, mistakes that will do him harm forever. The cinematographic body of Noé makes use of haptic image and sound, traversing a Bataillean path - through transgression, sensoriality and experimentation of the abject - and by them seeks to induce in the viewer what we call carnal affection and immanent corporeity as a way of punctuating the social and ethical questions proposed by the director.


Author(s):  
Bokshan Halyna

The purpose of the paper is to examine the specificity of the modeling of the character-narrator’s body identity in B. Hrabal’s novel “I Served the King of England”. Firstly it stresses on the body-centered nature of the narration in this literary work, in which the evolution of personality is represented as “a history of the body”. The study focuses on the techniques of restructurizing “the body scheme” and the manifestation of psychophysiological transgression caused by the existing “archetypal canons”. It traces the correlation of the semantics of the body identity with the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the ugly and with gender differentiation. The paper also considers gastronomy as one of the aspects of bodiliness in B. Hrabal’s novel. It details the poetics of grotesque which manifests itself in the descriptions of the body emphasizing its objectiveness. The study looks at the Rabelaisian traditions followed by the writer in the depiction of the scenes connected with eating both everyday food and exotic dishes. The research underlines that the body in B. Hrabal’s novel is displayed as a genetic data medium, visualized through physical characteristics, that highlights the social arrangement of the body identity problems. It pays attention to the social function of a human face in archaic societies originally interpreted in the novel. The research determines the peculiarities of the space marking of the body in the literary work and its correlation with the binary opposition “top–bottom”. It looks at the formation of the body identity by means of a mirror reflection and the image of the double. The conclusions of the research emphasize the specificity of the modeling of the body identity in the novel of the Czech writer. The results of this scientific paper can be used in further research on B. Hrabal literary prose and in comparative studie


2018 ◽  
pp. 25-29
Author(s):  
E. I. Onishchenko

The article is devoted to the analysis of the Polish aesthetic discourse of the twentieth century and the prospects for its interpretation in the Ukrainian aesthetics, particularly in the works by Kateryna Shevchuk, defended at the department of ethics, aesthetics and culture studies of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. These research greatly extend the idea of the aesthetic canon of the Polish thought, classically represented by the aesthetics R. Ingarden and W. Tatarkiewicz and reveal the names of virtually unknown in Ukraine Polish scientists, including special interest is the legacy of L. Blaustein, M. Wallis, H. Elzenberg and G. Ossowski. In particular, this perspective covers traditional for the twentieth century aesthetics problems, including psychology of art, collective aesthetic experience, ratio, fantasy, and imagination. Also, new interpretive perspectives of sublime and ugly, aesthetical experience are opened. The theoretical orientations of the Polish scholars, in one way or another, were connected with the cornerstones of the aesthetic science - its subject, the conceptual-categorical apparatus, the structure of aesthetic consciousness, the phenomenon of artistic creativity, the specific nature of art, and others. In the process of conceptual concretization, in the field of Polish aesthetics a number of problems have been rather clearly distinguished, among which the special attention of practically all of its leading representatives has attracted the phenomenon of aesthetical experience. K. Shevchuk’s investigation opens up an opportunity, at least in the format of a secondary interpretation, to join the research of the Polish scholars, whose work proved to be a giant "white spot" for the Ukrainian aestheticians. Introducing actually unexplored concepts Polish scientists to the modern Ukrainian aesthetic theory not only facilitates the opening of "unknown pages" in the history of the twentieth century aesthetics, but also makes actual mark of new approaches to the analysis of classical problems, the relevance of which will never be a subject of doubt.


Author(s):  
Stefano Mastandrea

Not only cognitive and affective processes determine an aesthetic experience; another important issue to consider has to do with the social context while experiencing the arts. Several studies have shown that the aesthetic impact of a work of art depends on, to an important extent, the different socio-demographic factors including age, class, social status, health, wealth, and so on. The concepts of cultural and social capital by Pierre Bourdieu and the production and consumption of artworks by Howard Becker are discussed. Another important aspect of the impact of the social context on aesthetic experience deals with early art experience in childhood within the family—considered as the first social group to which a person belongs.


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