Yesterday I attended a lecture given by an artists that the Chicago Art Institute. It made me rethink some of my views about meaning and aesthetic experience. I have for quite some time held to the view that the meaning we ascribe to an artwork is probably identical to what we regard as its aesthetic value. We are ecstatic because the work somehow opens the floodgates of association, memory, metaphor, and personal narratives, seemingly and all at once making us aware of our wholeness in the world. We construct the 'language' or the narratives that are the true aesthetic experience and then project them to the artwork which, we imagine, re-energizes them like a battery. However, although the artist giving the talk about her work did a convincing job of explaining her influences and source materials, her process, and her keen engagement with art history, saying in short, all the right things, I was flattened by work; it did not appeal. Everything she said was true to the facts of the work. It was also true of the best masterpieces in the museum. It was true and yet completely false in producing the least shiver of aesthetic regard.
I left thinking that words or narrative, whether the artist's or my own, could not give the 'spark of life' to an artwork. Something cannot be called art and thus become art. Something cannot be named or explained as art. If art can't be named then neither can it be un-named. The contextualization of an object as art does not make it art or non-art. I'm back to square one. The aesthetic experience stands aside from anything that is said to produce it, whether it is an object or simply a subjective feeling or association. Maybe the aesthetic experience is a willful and guilty vanity, a form of self-love always seeking expression but rarely earning it. WC
