Regarding aesthetic experience and efforts to define what it consists of, I suggest starting with when those experiences are said to begin. Do children, infants have aesthetic experiences and if so what are they, or what are their characteristics? What seems important is that at some point people learn from others what they ought to regard as an aesthetic feeling or thought, etc. Or they pick it up by implication through cultural images, slogans, songs, etc. I don't want to imply that all adult aesthetic experiences are learned, like words, but that some are learned and the rest are extensons, or metaphorical add-ons. One way to proeed is to ask what does one think of or what is one reminded of during the so-called aesthetic sensation. Those associations may be crucial, leading back to infancy, basic sensations. wc ________________________________ From: armando baeza <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: armando baeza <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, December 8, 2013 11:03 PM Subject: Re: comment invited "Aesthetic experiences" as i originally understood it, was that any thing under the umbrella between the two extremes of taste ,likes and dislikes. good-bad,ugly-beauty,etc could be an "aesthetic experience". To me,that means that any sudden feeling of any kind from nature or man made art could be an aesthetic feeling. The problem I see is that some people get a pleasant surprise feeling, while others may feel the opposite from the same experience. Yet both are really "aesthetic experiences",. ab
On Dec 8, 2013, at 11:29 AM, [email protected] wrote: > A position like mine -- shared, I realize, by many others including William > -- is that there is no mind-independent ontic status "art" such that a > given object or act either "IS" art or it's not, regardless of what any of us > think/feel. Still, any one of us is allowed to try to frame a description of > when we personally are willing to bestow the honorific label 'ART'. The > description is very likely to be fuzzy, but, minimally, serviceable. E.g., "I > call 'art' any object or event that gives me personally an aesthetic > experience." > > What constitutes an 'aesthetic experience' is subject to much discussion > (which I'd be pleased to see the forum embark on). And the description as > given is too short, leaving many questions. ("What? You'd call non-man-things > like a sunset or a piece of driftwood 'art'??!!) Note that this is a > stipulation about word use, not about ontic status. I'm not saying "If a work > occasions in me an a.e. it IS art." I'm saying only, "If a work occasions in me an > a.e. I CALL it art." The stipulation has the narrow use of helping a reader > realize what's on my mind when I say 'art'. > > I still ultimately cling to the feeling that the most intriguing question > is WHY do some things occasion a.e.'s in me. The second most is, Given the > disparity among genres -- music, arthitecture, dance, poetry, drama etc -- are > the feelings I get from each such that I can defend calling them all > 'aesthetic experiences'?
