Only For The Grade

WHAT IS THE VALUE OF ART? Prof. Andrea Baldini — UDCI — Week 2

VALUE AND EXPERIENCE ➤ Value of art generally

understood as aesthetic value

➤ Aesthetic value as the value afforded by an aesthetic experience

1. What is the aesthetic?

2. What is aesthetic experience?

THE PLURALITY OF THE “AESTHETIC”

➤ Art(s)playing a multiplicity of functions

➤ Different arts (art kinds) realizing different values

➤ Values grounded in experiencing an artwork

➤ Possibility of understanding other cultures by understanding different conception of aesthetic experience (?)

OVERVIEW 1. Aesthetic objectivism vs.

aesthetic subjectivism

2. Challenges to traditional theories of aesthetic experience

3. Pragmatist rescue of aesthetic experience

4. Neo-confucian models of aesthetic experience

1. AESTHETIC OBJECTIVISM VS. SUBJECTIVISM

➤ Aesthetic Objectivism (AO)

➤ Art possessing value (usually beauty) independently from the response of the appreciator

➤ Aesthetic Subjectivism (AS)

➤ Art possessing value as a consequence of the appreciator’s subjective response

AS & AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE (AE)

➤ “Beauty is no quality in things themselves; it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them” (Hume 1757)

➤ AE

➤ Evaluative dimension

➤ AE as intrinsically enjoyable

➤ Phenomenological dimension

➤ AE as immediately perceived in one’s consciousness

➤ Semantic dimension

➤ AE as meaningful (not mere sensation)

➤ Demarcational-definitional dimension

➤ AE as the essential feature of artHaring, Unfinished Painting (1989)

1882-85 1897 1902-1906

1905 1905

2. CHALLENGES TO AE ➤ Questioning the

phenomenological dimension of AE

➤ AE as not immediate

➤ Responses to art as cognitively penetrated

➤ Knowledge, beliefs, ideas, etc. influencing AE

➤ Reduction to interpretation?

Left: Zhang Xu’s calligraphy. Right: two throw-ups (Tokyo, Seoul)

4. PRAGMATIST RESCUE OF AE

➤ Analytic vs pragmatist:

➤ Descriptive vs. Evaluative

➤ Semantic vs. Phenomenological

➤ Definitional vs. Transformational

➤ Emphasis on AE as a way to rescue what it distinctly human

➤ Feeling

4. NEO-CONFUCIAN MODELS OF AE

➤ AE as intellectual intuition （⼼齋)

➤ Subjective experience

➤ Sensuous/perceptual pleasure

➤ Transcendence of one’s distinction from the universe