What is an Aesthetic Experience?

In discussing Aesthetics an inevitable difficulty is oversimplification. In order to discuss

aesthetic experiences we need to know what aesthetics is.

Encyclopaedia Britannica defines aesthetics as “The philosophical study of beauty and

taste.” (Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 02 Nov 2006, article-59174)

It is probable that the concept of beauty is as long as the history of mankind. Whether it
was discussed is not known, but even pre-humans like homo-erectus had objects like the
Venus of Berekhat Ram and the Venus of Tan-Tan, dating to 200-300,000 years ago,
which may have been art. Early homo-sapiens certainly had art with abstract designs
dating to 70,000 years ago.

Assumptions that the creativity of our prehistoric ancestors was inferior, brutish or
nonexistent (an attitude that fits the meta-narrative of modernism) are probably
unfounded. We should always remember the unfettered creativity of children and their
desire for ‘toys’ as vehicles for their imagination.

Today we know more about how our cave-dwelling ancestors would have lived.
…“Tribal societies are efficient. Hunting and gathering take up only so much time.
There are many hours left over for socialization.” … “Even the earliest and most
mundane artifacts we have seemed to be made with a feeling for style.
(New Scientist, 04 Nov 2006, p 41)

In more recent history Greek philosophy was a major influence and may have defined
Western art.
Plato described beauty as dependant on harmony, unity and proportion, and Aristotle as
dependant on order, symmetry and definiteness.
Other cultures developed their own aesthetics.

Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the six great ancient civilizations:
Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, India, and China. Each of these centers of early
civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics#Ancient_aesthetics)

Islamic art was initially abstract and geometric with much use of calligraphy.
The goal of Indian art was to induce spiritual and philosophical states.
Chinese art has along philosophical tradition.

‘Confucius emphasized the role of the arts and humanities (especially music and poetry)
in broadening human nature…’
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics#Ancient_aesthetics)

In sub-Saharan Africa artistic traditions including abstract sculptural forms were handed
down orally and, until colonialisation, had been little influenced by the West.

In the west medieval aesthetics focussed on human creativity as a revelation of the nature
of God.

Modern western traditions of aesthetics as a discipline date from the enlightenment.

A. G. Baumgarten published his Aesthetica in about 1758, defining aesthetics as meaning
‘sense perception’ or ‘cognitive perception’ to refer to the spectators experience of art.

In his Critiques, between 1781 and 1790 Kant described aesthetic experience as
dependant on the harmony of imagination and understanding, not depending on the
existence of the object, as subjective, and requiring the viewer to be ‘disinterested’.

Hegel felt that the ‘ideal’ showed itself through art, through the senses and the material,
and that aesthetic experience was objective.

Schopenhauer described Hegel’s view as freeing of the intellect from intention.

Subsequent theorists extended the investigation of aesthetics, investigating the

relationships between objects and experiences and providing a theoretical foundation for
the aesthetic understanding of the period of modernism and the modern. The conclusion
is that art is independent of prescriptive constraints limited to moral, religious or
educational purposes.

The accumulation of events during the period of the modern showed the meta-narrative to
be Eurocentric, colonialist, supremacist and lacking in humanity, attitudes often sustained
by government, science and institutionalised religion.
After two mechanised world wars, involving people from many races and religions, the
onset of the cold war precipitated a change in thinking.
Each strand of the meta-narrative was examined and challenged to determine its validity.
These challenges manifested themselves in the peace movement, movements for racial
equality, equality of rights for women, for sexual, racial and religious minorities,
economic and industrial rights and many others.

The process of challenge was undertaken with a vigour that became a movement itself.
Some of the underlying components of the meta-narrative have not changed. The desire
for progress has not gone away. The belief in technology as a tool for progress is still
there. What is changing is the framework of that belief. It is becoming inclusive of all
races, nationalities, religions, genders and minorities and instead of looking first at
national interests there is a tendency to look towards international solutions.

The degree of contact between cultures has increased dramatically. Satellite

communications and the internet have increased the volume of information (and noise)
substantially and international trade has increasingly affected art in the West.

The cultural changes and the nature of conceptual art, shock art, cyber art, body art,
performance art and many other innovations that challenge conventional ideas of
aesthetics caused contemporary aesthetics to redefine itself.

“To define its subject matter more precisely is, however, immensely difficult. Indeed, it
could be said that self-definition has been the major task of modern aesthetics.”

("Aesthetics." Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 02 Nov 2006,

www.britannica.com/eb/article-59174)

Self definition attempts to understand the nature of the aesthetic response in terms of the
relationships between the context and intentions (conscious and subconscious) of the
artist or creator of the work, the qualities of object experienced, the perceiver and their
context, and the nature and validity of the perceived experience. Increasingly it has to
take into account behavioural science, psychology and neuroscience.
The components of aesthetic experiences are examined to determine if they are essential
to the concept of an aesthetic experience.

In general use the term aesthetics is used to mean the artists (or perceiver’s) artistic
principles, preferences or agenda. In philosophical aesthetics Carroll suggests that there
are three distinct usages. The first use is broad; it is similar to the term ‘philosophy of art’
except that it is reception oriented and includes nature rather than object oriented.
A second case of theoretical use is like Baumgarten’s, in this sense it includes:

“… ‘aesthetic experience’, ‘aesthetic perception’ and the ‘aesthetic attitude’. These

phrases all refer to some mental state that a spectator brings to or undergoes in either in
artworks or nature.”(Carroll, N, 2005, Routledge, p157.)
The terms ‘aesthetic properties’ or ‘aesthetic qualities’ refer to the response dependant
properties of artworks. Terms like graceful, disorganized, or monumental indicate this
type of use. A third usage by aesthetic theorists like Danto and Beardsley defines art in
terms of aesthetic experience, in addition, assuming something unique about art that gives
us a special experience.

“Artworks are just objects and events predicated upon installing aesthetic experiences in
audiences” (Carroll N, 2005, p159)

All suggest that an aesthetic attitude is different from everyday interactions with objects.

An attitude independent of any motivations to do with utility, economic value, moral

judgment, or peculiarly personal emotion and concerned with experiencing the object
for its own sake. At the limit the observer’s state would be pure detachment.
(Hondereich, 1995, p8)

Dewey suggests that this type of state need not be limited to art. It seems similar to the
states encouraged in religious practice (e.g. a prayerful attitude or a meditative state).
Similar states of connectedness are often sought in techniques of innovative problem
solving in other fields.

In Psychology
Transpersonal theory proposes that there are developmental stages beyond the adult
ego, which involve experiences of connectedness with phenomena considered outside
the boundaries of the ego. In healthy individuals, these developmental stages can
engender the highest human qualities, including altruism, creativity, and intuitive
wisdom.
(jppr.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/8/1/12)

A limitation of the third usage is the implication that the artist is wholly responsible for
the aesthetic experience, others feel that the process is dependant on the viewer but may
be stimulated by the artist. In some cases the artist’s intention dominates (Often in music
or poetry). In cases such as abstract art the recipient projects the meaning onto the
artwork. Mostly a combination of projection and reception is required.
The failure by Danto to define art in terms of aesthetics, for him, meant that the concept
of aesthetic experience itself was invalid.

There is a question as to whether aesthetic experiences are real and objective (Hegel) or
are subjective (Kant), which arises due to the nature of the experiences that we associate
with the subject of aesthetics. The words used at first seem to have a meaning that is not
precise or exact: all appear subjective, highly dependant on the person, their attitude or
mood, their knowledge, and the culture, the historical time and circumstances of the
experience, and hence may not be common with the experiences of others. If an aesthetic
experience is to be judged as ‘real’ then the terms used need to be objective, and the
experience itself to be describable or explainable in objective terms. The words are
qualitative rather than quantitative which makes it harder to see them as objective.
In addition, the processes of aesthetics should be capable of crossing cultures,
nationalities, tastes, styles and times without losing validity.
Aesthetic properties are not real in the sense that they exist without an observer in the
way that physical properties such as mass exist. Aesthetic properties are response
dependant. Carroll uses the fact that colour perception is an objective experience and is
response dependant to confirm that other response dependant properties may also be
objective.

I have difficulty in having aesthetic experiences. I have a fidgety mind and seldom allow
myself time or space for contemplation. When I appreciate natural events such as sunsets,
landscapes, storms, clouds etc, aesthetically, I am usually in a location where I am free
from material and social distractions. I feel that it is not insignificant that the objects and
events that are frequently associated with aesthetic experience are in special locations like
galleries, museums, concert halls, parks and theatres. These locations may assist in
gaining the ‘disinterested’ state advocated. I also have problems with the idea of beauty
in defining aesthetic experiences. The sorts of emotions and processes that I associate
with aesthetic experiences are not necessarily about objects that are in themselves
beautiful. This problem is addressed in part by Dewey, Carroll, Petts and Shusterman.
I would suggest that McMahon, gave a clue to a more useful way of considering beauty

Perhaps when the [relevant perceptual] principles are invoked in any way which is
likely to draw our attention from straight-forward object recognition to the process of
perception as a solution to a problem, we are experiencing beauty [McMahon 1999]
(Nelson and Schiff, 2003, p 279)

Barry also suggests that the most exiting art is ‘art that breaks patterns’ (Barry J. 1999
p160) as it generates the new conceptual patterns necessary to help adaptation to
changing circumstances. In other words that the beauty of aesthetic experience is in the
perception, the connections made, the concepts involved, the thought processes triggered
by observation and not the object. It is difficult to separate the concept of beauty from the
sublime and from matters of taste.
 Some 20 years ago, I was working as an engineer.
While travelling by train to London, reading a
newspaper, I came across a report, accompanied by a
black and white image, on an auction of a tiffany
dragonfly wall lamp. The idea of using coloured glass ,
with copper filigree, and precipitated, in my minds eye
the potential of brilliance, colour, transparency and
light in the medium, and a realisation that it could be
‘made’. I was changed, became fascinated and
gradually over the next ten years or so moved from
engineering to art.

I subsequently discovered that that although the form

is fascinating, often Tiffany’s glass is dull and opaque.
Although my response can, be called wholly projected,
in that the qualities I gave the object were not the
actual properties of the object but were in my
imagination, the process of introjection that took place,
the intuitive leap, transferring the projected properties
of the image to the objective properties of the medium in my understanding validates the
experience.

A Work that never fails give me pleasure is

Morris Graves ‘bird singing in the moonlight’
The emotions inspired are wonder, ecstasy and
intimacy. The warm, gentle light slowly
descending like rain, joining the small
insignificant ball of feathers that is putting its
essence into raising its song to the light above is
uplifting.

If I choose, I can analyse the image and the

artist’s intentions. I know that Graves was a
Buddhist, and travelled widely in Asia and that
he was strongly influenced by Japanese culture.
Morris Graves
‘Bird Singing in the Moonlight’
I also know that he appropriated Mark Tobey’s ‘White Writing’ adapting it to give the
energy in the light in the painting. I know that he was working in the mountains near
Seattle. I can list the symbols and interpret them. If I am feeling bloody minded I can
even feel sorry for the poor, dumb bird, prevented from sleeping and forced to sing
because the light levels trigger its instinctive responses. The feeling evoked for me by the
picture however, does not change.

The Tobey-like writing and geometric forms in which the bird is submerged was a
conscious attempt to poetically help materialize a molecular content of moonlight, to
 bring it into touchable proximity ... a moonlight impregnated with messages. The bird
was given two heads because of its divided emotion-ecstatic song, or humility and
silence in the presence of moonlight; a linking of joy and despair” (Graves to Willis,
April 30, 1944). (www.historylink.org/essays/output.cfm?file_id=5205)

Another work that gives me pleasure is Naum Gabo’s “Linear Construction in Space”.
This is partly for non-aesthetic reasons, because as a child I played with making similar
constructions and partly because I appreciate the mathematics behind the work. I may
also be appreciating it because I find graphical mathematics easier to deal with than
algebraic forms.

Naum Gabo
“Linear Construction in Space”

This piece is difficult to describe

aesthetically. Words like soaring,
floating, wavelike, space and void come
to mind. It engages and re-engages my
attention with its apparent movement. It
gives me similar emotions to looking at
pictures of the cosmos from Hubble.

It corresponds to Dewey’s Ideas on

aesthetics being broader than art.
Certainly mathematics uses terms like
elegant in describing proofs.

This leads on to several works that evoke a similar response and are linked in other ways,
although at first sight, radically different, have similarities.
In all I find that my attention is distracted and is transferred to an abstract space. I am
unable to focus on one part of the object as my vision drifts. Words like movement,
space, absorbed, transferred and meditative come to mind.

Jackson Pollock. Summertime no 9A.

In Pollock’s work, in addition to the responses above, there is an unexpected unity in the
patterns of colour and a constant movement.
Why this unity exists may come from Pollock’s working to music, almost dancing into
the work. It has been discovered that the image is fractal.

Mark Rothko: Black on Maroon.

There is a structure which has been linked to the colours and forms of his childhood
Oregon. Rothko himself said that he was interested only in expressing the basic human
emotions like ecstasy, and tragedy.
It is suggested that whatever emotions are raised they are not part of the ‘meaning’ of a
work. That ‘meaning’ can only be induced by the presence of a signifier.
 Without this symbolic reference the paintings may in some way inspire the kind of
feeling- awe, perhaps – that contemplation of the profundities of a religious creed
inspire, but they do not convey a religious meaning (Barry, J , 1999, p115)

Barry suggests that the meaning in Rothko is in the material qualities of the work, the
juxtaposition of dark and light, and that it is this that provides a ‘metaphor for
conceptualizing struggles of light and dark in ethical or religious terms’ (Barry J, 1999,
p116)

Anish Kapoor. ‘Ishi’s Light’

I find this work dramatic; it enclosed me

and enveloped me in a sort of non-colour.
The light effects were strange. drawing me
in and enclosing me in the colour.
The third dimension generates awe.

Anish Kapoor in his work represents the

invisible in the visible, juxtaposing presence
and absence and otherness. Barry’s
description (above) of Rothko’s work
applies.

Inspired by Barnet Newman, Kapoor says in an interview with Blomburg.com:

What this work does, it's a kind of rolled-up painting. What it does is make this
column of light. As you walk into the work, it has a deep red interior. It isn't black, but
deep red, like a blood red. So you're kind of entering a body. And as you're entering
the work, the column of light is like a virtual object, it's a physical object. It isn't
simply on the surface. I think something is occurring there with the reflections, which
is what is important to me.
(www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?
pid=10000102&sid=amP1_M3NI95w&refer=uk)

I found that the similarity of my responses to significantly different works revealing.

There are common qualities light, colour, meditative and movement that link my
responses.
My own Aesthetic experiences represent an internal struggle to comprehend the
emotional and spiritual aspects of myself and the rest of creation. I am aware in a vague
unfocussed way of a mass of ‘unknowns’ in terms of ‘what I feel’ etc and a struggle to
make a meaningful pattern of the world ‘as it is’.

In researching the essay I found unexpected links between some of the works, from
Tiffany to abstract expressionism, abstract expressionism to Graves, and to Anish
Kapoor.

Louis C Tiffany is seen as a precursor of abstract expressionism…In the 1950’s this

school rescued Favrile glass from obscurity and derision. The glass objects were
acknowledged as the earliest examples of pure form and colour expressed through free
design. Tiffany allowed his medium to express emotion without representation …
(Paul, T, 1996 p124)

This work is ‘Ishi's Light.’ ... It refers to a work by one of the artists I've always
admired, Barnett Newman. Barnett Newman made a work called ‘Anna's Light.’ In a
way, it's the quintessential zip painting. Anish Kapoor to Blomburg.com
(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?
pid=10000102&sid=amP1_M3NI95w&refer=uk)

I find that Dewey’s view of aesthetic experience as transformational and not defined by
art, and wanting to integrate it into the real world, as more in agreement with my own
experiences. This also provides a way for conceptual art such as Duchamp’s fountain,
and disruptive art to be appreciated as art.

We accept the view that, in principle, every text (in fact every random occurrence)
may occasion an aesthetic experience in the recipient, if the latter is favourably
disposed to such an experience, and is meeting the stimulus of text (or occurrence)
under such conditions as allow aesthetic perception.

(Fokkema, D, Poetics Today, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1982,

pp. 61-79 doi:10.2307/1772206)

A useful image of an aesthetic experience is that of the operation of a neural net: This can
be described as a number of fully interconnected nodes (concepts or facts), the
connections having a weighting corresponding to relevance of the relationship between
nodes. The process of learning could be understood as adding a new node or modifying a
weighting between nodes.
An aesthetic experience could, in this model, correspond to an avalanche of changes in
the grouping of many nodes, and the patterns and weighting between nodes.

This has a correspondence in part to Michel Foucaults description of Hermeneutic’s, but

also is in concord with Dewey’s and Petts ideas on aesthetics.
 Connection making itself in the age of neuroscience can be imaged, can almost be felt,
as a subtle movement and flashing of the neurons and synapses of the brain- creating
and recreating in memory and imagination representations of things meeting and
parting, arranging themselves and dissolving. Scientists without embarrassment, use
words beautiful and elegant about mathematics and the structures of cells and stardust.

(Strange and Charmed, Ede, S, p 10.)

We can accept with some certainty the accounts of concept formation as the brain
checks input against the widely dispersed neuronal patterns that make up memory. The
importance of this ‘thinking by pattern recognition’ may well suggest a learning role
for art as that sort of ‘information’ that is most richly patterned.”

(Barry J. 1999, p131)

The idea proposed by Danto, Beardsley and (later) Iseminger of aesthetics only applying
to art objects is dealt with satisfactorily by Petts who criticises Iseminger's new
aestheticism as “… narrowly focused on artistic modes of production and reception.”
(Petts, J, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2005, p21)

Agreeing with Shusterman who says that

To take work as merely experienced immediacy is to rob it of enduring wholeness and
cumulative meaning through communicative tradition, disintegrating ‘the unity of the
aesthetic object into the multiplicity of experiences’ (TM , p85) and ignoring art’s
relation to the world and it’s claim to truth.
Schusterman, 1997, Journal of aesthetics and art criticism, Vol 55, No1

Petts comments further that Carroll’s

… ‘narrative’ approach to identifying artworks, whereby artworks are identified by
their relation to the canon of existing artworks, tends to discount the expectation of
artists and spectators in making and viewing art that works are valuable and
experientially powerful

(Petts, J, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2005, p21)

adding
I then note the broader aesthetic considerations characteristic of pragmatist aesthetics
in John Dewey and Richard Shusterman, contrasting their life-centered accounts of the
aesthetic with Iseminger's art-centered one, before suggesting a new aestheticism that
might synthesise these approaches around the notion of 'good work'.
(Petts, J, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2005, p21)

This aesthetic is not dissimilar to William Morris’s ideal expressed in 1879 of “an art
which is made by the people and for the people as a happiness to the maker and the user’
(Morris, W, 1929, p66)