G. Gabrielle StarrFeeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic ExperienceFeeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience. G. Gabrielle Starr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. viii+259.

Empirical aesthetics has found its way into mainstream cognitive science. Until now, most research has focused either on identifying the internal processes that underlie a perceiver's aesthetic experience or on identifying the stimulus features that lead to a specific type of aesthetic experience. To progress, empirical aesthetics must integrate these approaches into a unified paradigm that encourages researchers to think in terms of temporal dynamics and interactions between: (i) the stimulus and the perceiver; (ii) different systems within the perceiver; and (iii) different layers of the stimulus. At this critical moment, empirical aesthetics must also clearly identify and define its key concepts, sketch out its agenda, and specify its approach to grow into a coherent and distinct discipline.

The paper is based on the assumption that modern art centralises aesthetic experience in a specific way, why it as well be may regarded – in contrast to the rather forced interpretation of art already opposed by Susan Sontag (Sontag 2001, 10) – as an appropriate mode for encountering art. However, the theoretical discourse on aesthetic experience is characterised by opposite poles, which will be examined in the first part of this paper. On the one hand, there is the utopian conception around 1800, in which the reflection on aesthetic experience originally is rooted, in Friedrich Schiller’sOn the Aesthetic Education of Man(cf. Noetzel 2006, 198) or Friedrich Schlegel’s imaginations of a life in art inLucinde(cf. Dziudzia 2015, 38sqq.). On the other hand, the reflections in the German discourse at the beginning of the 20th century are marked in a conspicuously negative way, which can still be seen until the 1980s.In the theoretical first part of the essay, a few cursory positions on the ›problem of the aesthetic human being‹ will be considered initially, which reject aesthetic views in everyday life and evaluate such tendencies as forms of social decay. Concerned about morality on the surface, these positions indeed aim at criticising individual lifestyles in a modern world, which, in particular, are opposed to conservative and collectivist ideas of society and morality. These discourse positions, which are ultimately ideologically grounded, then lead to the deliberate reflections on aesthetic experience, as they unfold most notably from the 1970s onwards, where they form the implicit background.As will be shown, the explicitly negative evaluation expressed in the earlier positions then shapes the assessments of aesthetic experience of Hans-Robert Jauß (cf. Jauß 2007), Peter Bürger (cf. Bürger 1977) and Rüdiger Bubner (cf. Bubner 1989) as a fundamental, rather implicit scepticism. For the most part, their positions seem to make it impossible to think of the aesthetic experience as enrichment or to evaluate it positively, as is common in the US-American discourse, for instance.The latter stance, which is, in essence, initiated by John Dewey and his consciously non-strict separation between art and everyday life as well as his decidedly anti-elitist understanding of art and aesthetics, is more in keeping with the utopian concepts of around 1800. However, his writings only find late distribution in Germany (cf. Dewey 1980). In contrast to Dewey’s position – and Susan Sontag’s explicit rejection of the interpretation as a violent act and the omittance of the sensual experience of the artwork (Sontag 2001) – the critical condemnation of aesthetic experience, which ultimately remains unfounded in the German discourse (because of its implicit ideological origin), now appears challenged.In fact, attentive observation in an aesthetic stance becomes part of the aesthetic programme in modern art across the board (cf. Dziudzia 2015b). Bürger reflects on this and offers – especially in the examination of Marcel ProustIn Search of Lost Time – a productive proposal to grasp the ›aestheticizing perception‹ (as he calls it) as a literary technique. In his conception, Bürger refers to media as a specific ›projection area‹ of aesthetic experience, especially in literature around 1900. The ›imaginary fadings‹ (cf. Schmitz-Emans 2001) in modern literature are, following Bürger, to be further thought of as ›exponentiated‹ aesthetic experiences, which find their form not only around 1900 but also in more recent literature.Therefore, in the second part of the paper and the exemplary reading of a contemporary German novel, Martin MosebachsDer Mond und das Mädchen(The Moon and the Maiden), published in 2007, it is to be shown how aesthetic experience finds complex forms. In the specific shaping of imaginary fadings in the interplay of figure and narrator level, especially in recourse to the medium film to be observed therein, the ambivalence of the theoretical concept of aesthetic experience insinuates as will be argued.

This paper proposes a model of information aesthetics in the context of information visualization. It addresses the need to acknowledge a recently emerging number of visualization projects that combine information visualization techniques with principles of creative design. The proposed model contributes to a better understanding of information aesthetics as a potentially independent research field within visualization that specifically focuses on the experience of aesthetics, dataset interpretation and interaction. The proposed model is based on analysing existing visualization techniques by their interpretative intent and data mapping inspiration. It reveals information aesthetics as the conceptual link between information visualization and visualization art, and includes the fields of social and ambient visualization. This model is unique in its focus on aesthetics as the artistic influence on the technical implementation and intended purpose of a visualization technique, rather than subjective aesthetic judgments of the visualization outcome. This research provides a framework for understanding aesthetics in visualization, and allows for new design guidelines and reviewing criteria.

Reviewed by: Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History by Michael A. Fuller Graham Sanders Michael A. Fuller. Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. Pp. 526. $60 (cloth). ISBN 978-0674073227. The Song dynasty is an era, perhaps more so than any other in Chinese history, in which the discussion amongst the literati of the role of patterned written language (wen 文) in society reached new levels of urgency. How does written language express the mind in relation to the world? How is it received and evaluated by others? How does it relate to the cosmos of which it is a part? In this book, Michael Fuller has drawn a clear and detailed picture of the how these questions (and many more) were being asked and answered during the transition from the Northern to the Southern Song, when the very foundations of knowledge were up for debate. The result is a masterful work of scholarship that simultaneously tackles the practice and theory of poetry in China from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries and the problem of trying to write a literary history of that time. The challenge of writing a history of any kind is the question of how to juxtapose the particular and the general in a way that respects the specificity of the particulars while also rendering an intelligible narrative that seeks to elucidate patterns in the relations among particulars. It is an impossible task—there are degrees of success but never complete success. Fuller's account is highly successful in that he makes the terms, parameters, and assumptions that ground his project crystal clear over the course of a five-hundred-page book that is packed with both historical detail and philosophical insight. The Introduction, "Casting Off: A Theoretical Introduction," concisely lays the philosophical groundwork for the rest of the book. Drawing upon Kant's notion of "aesthetic judgment" as a kind of "reflective judgment" that gives one "an intuition of order about a particular object" (20), Fuller defines "the literary" as "the aesthetic organizing of language" (which would serve as a good definition of the Chinese term wen). As observers of the empirical world—including its instantiations of language—we have a sense of what parts of that world are related to one another according to a larger principle, which is often not directly apparent to us. This admits a rather generous notion of the literary, for the aesthetic judgment lies not solely in the fashioner of literary words, but also (perhaps primarily?) in the one who receives them. This means, according to Fuller, "as long as some linguistic utterance is a work that is (or has been) the object of aesthetic experience, it is part of literary [End Page 309] history" (12). This, of course, leads one to ask, what constitutes "aesthetic experience"? To be of any use in the practice of literary history, the notion of aesthetic experience must be historically grounded. In a deft summary of Adorno's view on the "material particularity" of art, Fuller states: "This materiality returned art to history, but history inhered not only in the techniques through which the work was created but also in the play of categories through which the artwork attained its appearance of unity and its status as art" (26). In other words, aesthetic judgments are always made in history using categories that mean something to particular historical actors in given places and times. These actors will often posit the idea of universal and changeless categories of meaning that they imagine transcend their historical moment. In a tantalizing but brief section on the "cognitive turn" (14–18), Fuller suggests that such enduring categories might have a biological basis in the mind but defers further discussion of the issue as being beyond the scope of his book. The danger of looking back at aesthetic judgments made centuries ago in an entirely different culture is that modern critics make their interpretations based on their own assumed categories of meaning. Fuller readily acknowledges that "we cannot hope to entirely understand the discursive and wider...

Background. An analysis of foreign literature covering the models of aesthetic experience (AE) revealed a number of limitations: the absence of nonlinear dynamics, multi-level processes and integration of personality traits; to overcome these limitations, we developed a System-Dynamic Model of AE (SDM-AE). Objective. The aim is to conduct an empirical verification of the predictions of the SDM-AE, based on the material of new media art and non-academic erotic paintings. Study Participants. The study involved 750 respondents aged from 16 to 38 years (MAge = 23.86; SD = 6.53), about 84% of them are women — students of Stroganov’s University, Moscow Institute of Psychoanalysis and school students from Moscow. Methods. The study engaged the structural equation modeling, as well as psychodiagnostics tools to measure the following constructs: aesthetic emotions, aesthetic judgments, art interest, aesthetic experience, engagement with beauty, attitudes towards technology, implicit theories of creativity and attitudes towards sex. Linear regression and mediation analyses were used to process the data.Results. The mediation analysis showed that aesthetic judgments are mediating variables between attitudes towards sex, attitudes towards technology and aesthetic emotions, the integration of flow dispositions into SDM-AE is shown. Universal personal variables that are actualized regardless of the content of the material are revealed. It is shown that the AE of new media art directly predicts a positive attitude towards technology, aesthetic responsiveness and contributes to the development of implicit theories of creativity. Conclusions. Empirical verification of the SDM-EO allows us to conclude that the model is valid, and the results obtained contribute to the development of Russian psychology of art.

People differ in how they respond to artworks. Measuring such individual differences is helpful for explaining response variability and selecting particularly responsive subsamples. On the basis of a sample of items indicating relevant behavior and experience, we exploratively constructed the Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA), a screening tool for the assessment of individual differences in responsiveness to art in English and German. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggested three first-order factors labeled aesthetic appreciation, intense aesthetic experience, and creative behavior, and a second-order factor aesthetic responsiveness. Aesthetic responsiveness was assessed in N= 781 participants from the United States and Germany, and measurement invariance analysis demonstrated full metric and partial scalar invariance across language versions. AReA scale scores yielded good reliability estimates. Validation studies confirmed expected associations between AReA scale scores and measures of related constructs, as well as continuously and retrospectively recorded responses to music, visual art, and poetry. In summary, the AReA is a promising, psychometrically evaluated instrument to assess aesthetic responsiveness built on a mixture of exploratory and confirmatory construction strategies. It can be used as a screening tool both in English and German speaking samples.

Creative arts research is often motivated by emotional, personal and subjective concerns; it operates not only on the basis of explicit and exact knowledge, but also on that of tacit and experiential knowledge. Experience operates within in the domain of the aesthetic and knowledge produced through aesthetic experience is always contextual and situated. The continuity of artistic experience with normal processes of living is derived from an impulse to handle materials and to think and feel through their handling. The key term for understanding the relationship between experience, practice and knowledge is ‘aesthetic experience’, not as it is understood through traditional eighteenth century accounts, but as ‘sense activity’.In this article, I will draw on the work of John Dewey, Michael Polanyi and others to argue that creative arts practice as research is an intensification of everyday experiences from which new knowledge or knowing emerges. The ideas presented here will be illustrated with reference to case studies based on reflections, by the artists themselves, on successful research projects in dance, creative writing and visual art.

The purpose of this paper is to pursue art educational meaning and direction of future by understanding aesthetic experience in the aesthetic practice of human beings who encounter art. I regard art as a prac-tice or act rather than a specific object, incident or thing. I hope to further clarify its aesthetic significance and its perspective on the educational aspect. Today, art is a culture that has unique characteristics that distinguish it from other academic disciplines such as society, politics, and economics, and it serves to broaden the horizon of understanding of the nature of the human spirit. Examine human aesthetic practice based on experience with art, and examine the meaning and character of 'aesthetic' as an educational ac-tivity of human beings surrounding art, treating art as a kind of human practical form as visual art. Aesthetic experience is the practice in which the object and the subject communicate with each other vigorously, and the practice is not a passive process of accepting the aesthetic attributes of the object, but a concrete practice. Aesthetic experience is differentiated from everyday human practice and has the power to re-flectively reflect on history and society, the world and myself. Through such aesthetic experiences, practical forms of aesthetic situations can be discovered and educational outcomes that are meaningful to human beings can be derived.

In the present study, we examined the eye movement behaviour of children and adults looking at five Van Gogh paintings in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. The goal of the study was to determine the role of top-down and bottom-up attentional processes in the first stages of participants’ aesthetic experience. Bottom-up processes were quantified by determining a salience map for each painting. Top-down processing was manipulated by first allowing participants to view the paintings freely, then providing background information about each painting, and then allowing them to view the paintings a second time. The salience analysis showed differences between the eye movement behaviour of children and adults, and differences between the two phases. In the children, the first five fixations during the free viewing phase were strongly related to visually salient features of the paintings—indicating a strong role for bottom-up factors. In the second phase, after children had received background information, top-down factors played a more prominent role. By contrast, adults’ observed patterns were similar in both phases, indicating that bottom-up processes did not play a major role when they viewed the paintings. In the second phase, children and adults both spent more time looking at regions that were mentioned in the background information. This effect was greater for adults than for children, confirming the notion that adults, when viewing paintings, rely much more on top-down processing than children.


 
 
 Arabic Poetics: Aesthetic Experience in Classical Arabic Literature. By Lara Harb. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 298. $99.99 (cloth); $29.99 (paper); $18.49 (ebook).
 
 

The present socio-ecological crises demand that we develop new ways of knowing and new kinds of action but also new ways of experiencing and feeling. To explore this demand, and inspired by A.N. Whitehead and Félix Guattari, this book outlines a ‘new aesthetic paradigm’: a generalized aesthetics acknowledging the primacy of aesthetic experience across all entities, phenomena and processes in order to sensitize contemporary knowledge practices to the nature and import of the present crises’ aesthetic dimensions. The book departs from the dominant understanding of aesthetics as a realm of human privilege and follows the transformation of our understanding of cultural and knowledge practices when predicated on aesthetic experience and feeling. This involves two interrelated assertions that upturn the prevailing understanding of aesthetics. First, aesthetics precedes and cannot be separated from knowledge: feeling and knowing are indivisible. Second, the ‘social’, typically seen as the source and cause of aesthetics, is itself the upshot of aesthetic processes. Taking up the proposition of generalized aesthetics, the contributors, from disciplines including cultural studies, design, English, law, geography, performance, philosophy and sociology, address how such an understanding of aesthetics plays out when confronted with environmental, technoscientific and ‘social’ matters of concern and care.

The object of this study is the aesthetic and artistic experience of contemporaries in the processes of symbolic production and exchange. In addition, we were interested in the experience of urban residents formed by the influence of the public space of everyday life. We are hypothesized to relate the degree of aesthetic experience, artistic tastes of a person, as well as the significant public interest in a quasi-aesthetic (or "aesthezi") phenomenon with the "sensory hunger" phenomenon. Methodologically important for the study was the principle of "incomplete comprehension of the object", since we analyze human sensuality by considering a specific product of human social activity. They serve as the macro level of analysis, the results of contemporary artistic practices, including visual art, street art, etc. We also take into account the social request of contemporaries to search for artistic innovations, not only through exhibitions, opening hours, museum exhibitions, etc. We take into account that many contemporaries find satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the results of current artistic practices due to the mass media, individually paying attention to color, silhouette, outline, composition, subject matter of the image (micro level of analysis). The semiotic analysis of the visual object and the hermeneutic method were relevant for this study. We have analyzed a specific quasi-aesthetic phenomenon, namely simulacra. The role of simulacra in the informational interaction of human beings in post-industrial society is explored in this article and the typical and specific features of this socio-cultural phenomenon are explored. They are considered as a kind of simulacra with a visual presentation. We argue that in the spiritual life of modern man and society, the aesthetic and artistic components no longer have ancestral subordination. The reason for this is that harmony, the improvement of human tastes in the "sphere of sensual phenomena" is no longer a mandatory requirement on the part of society for artistic practices, in particular contemporary art.

Summary Embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism of our brain, and its neural underpinnings are discussed and connected to intersubjectivity and the reception of human cultural artefacts, like visual arts and film. Embodied simulation provides a unified account of both non-verbal and verbal aspects of interpersonal relations that likely play an important role in shaping not only the self and his/her relation to others, but also shared cultural practices. Embodied simulation sheds new light on aesthetic experience and is proposed as a key element for the dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities within the biocultural paradigm.

Based on concepts of cognitive mastering and the rewarding effect of making sense of challenging visual art (taken from a psychological model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments of Leder et al., 2004), we hypothesised that viewers who have knowledge about an artist’s disability will appreciate their ambiguous works more than viewers who do not have such knowledge. Additionally, we aimed to explore how information about the artist’s disability changes the viewer’s aesthetic emotions. We investigated the effect of information on the creator’s visual disability on aesthetic experience in relation to three categories of visual art: photos, sculptures, and drawings. We showed digital reproductions of artworks (N = 32) produced by amateur artists with severe visual impairment to nonexperts in art (N = 145). Viewers assessed their aesthetic appreciation (understood as liking and value) and aesthetic emotions on the Self-Assessment Manikin scales for valence, arousal, dominance, origin, and significance. In accordance with our hypothesis, knowledge of the artists' disability had a positive influence on appreciation, but the effect of information was moderated by artwork category and was significant only in the case of sculptures and drawings (works created using these techniques were assessed in the preliminary study as more difficult to interpret than photos). A similar pattern of results was found for the dependent variables of arousal and significance. Therefore, the positive influence of information about the artists' disabilities on aesthetic experience is mainly revealed when the artworks are characterised by low detectability (defined as the difficulty in interpreting an artwork due to difficulty in recognizing what it depicts).

Jacques Maquet. The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 1986. xi plus 272 pp. $35.00 (cloth).