Toward a Science of Aesthetics: Issues and Ideas

• The opening chapter of the book Aesthetics of Science by Arthur P.Shimamura
  • draws on ideas, identifies issues in aesthetics science from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.

Problem Space: what is aesthetics

• aesthetics when it was coined by Alexander Baumgarten: the study of how to mind beholds beautiful objects
  • aesthetic response/experience: feelings of beauty; certain physical properties of an object may evoke it, but the experience itself is purely subjective.
• Now: all kinds of hedonic response (a preference judgment) to a sensory experience
  • all kinds of emotion: beauty, anger, horror (emotion)
  • pique sensory processes (perception)
  • new idea, past experience (conception)
• Who: beholder’s experience, not artist’s. Highlight the ways in which art is perceived, interpreted (conceptual), and felt (emotional).
• object of interest: art (some art may be anti-aesthetic), natural phenomena, objects not intended to be art

Philosophical: 4 approaches that highlights different aspects of human psychological experiences

Mimetic: an imitation of the real world

Plato: art is at best a twice removal from the ideal world Aristotle: art could rarify essential univerals In paintings, artists create the illusion of objects in 3-D space on a 2-D surface , a feat that requires the knowledge of reverse-engineering the human vision.

• linear perspective and chiaroscuro

Expressionist: express and induce emotions

• Francis Hutcheson: feelings of beauty and pleasure, independent of the object’s purpose or function; subjective feelings but there are absolute standards.
• David Hume: beauty is purely subjective (taste), because it is not in objects themselves. But there is universal standards on taste.
• Kant: We interpret the world by linking sensory experience to pre-existing concepts or ideas (cognitive approach).
  • judgments of taste => decide what gives us pleasureable feelings
  • features of objects that are pleasureable: agreeable, good, and beautiful. Aesthetic judgements are judgments/evaluations of beautiful things
  • beauty: innate idea, a universal concept => Aesthetic judgments are both subjective (experience) and universal (innate, universal concept of beauty)
  • sublime: not a proeprty of an object, it is a feeling to be elicited.
  • aesthetic judgments are not associated with an object’s function or purpose: disinterested => art for art’s sake, Romanticism

Formalist: abstract the sensory quality

• Clement Greenberg about painting: 2-D is 2-D, not an illusion of 3-D. Impressionism.
• Clive Bell: the essence of the aesthetic experience as per- ceiving significant form. The beholder considers an artwork purely on the basis of sensory features—that is, the aesthetic interplay of colors, lines, textures, and shapes: content and objects in a painting are irrelevant.
• The advent of photographs moved artist away from mimetic and expressionist approaches to a formalist approach.

Conceptual: convey a concept

• prehistory art: convey a message, often to a higher being.
• post-modernism: meta-art: try to explore the nature/meaning of art
  • ex: Duchamp’s Fountain
• requires knowledge about the symbolic referents displayed in an artwork. To appreciate meta-art statements, it is necessary to have knowledge about art history and the various ways art has been defined.

Summarization of Philosophical approaches

Each of these approaches highlights different aspects of the beholder’s mental processes involved in the art experience: sensory processes with mimetic and formalist approaches, emotional processes with an expressionist approach, and semantic or cognitive processes with a conceptual approach.

Empirical Approaches: Psychological Science

Perception

• Gustav Fechner, 1860: Psychophysics: the ways in which physical stimuli are registered by the mind.
  • Fechner, 1876: psychophysics of aesthetics. He suggested that aesthetics could be studied from the bottom up (elemental perceptual features): preference judgments for basic shapes, colors.
• Gestalt psychology, early 20th century: perceptions could not be dissected into basic elements. It is the organization of a visual scene that we interpret and not the elemental features; the principle of Prägnanz, the notion that we organize our perceptions based on the simplest or most succinct interpretations.
  • Rudolf Arnheim applied Gestalt principles to the study of visual aesthetics. His Gestaltist interpretations stressed the manner in which the organization and dynamics of perceptual features act to create interest- ing works of art. He described paintings with respect to the “perceptual forces” that artists induced through balance, harmony, and object placement, anf these forces give rise to aesthetic experiences, such as a sense of calm or tenseness.

Emotion

Daniel Berlyne:

• optimally pleasing artworks are those that create some arousal or psychological tension but not so much that they become disturbing.
• arousal is determined by specific features of artworks, such as novelty, complexity, surprisingness, uncertainty, and incongruity: they must work together to produce emotion, the greater the nuumber of those features, the greater the arousal.
  • the features are not properties of the object, but related to the beholder’s past experience and knowledge.

Empirical Approaches: Cognitive Science

• draws heavily on computer-based models of how the mind works.
• information processing approach: the way sensory signals act as information that is encoded, interpreted, represented, and stored.
  • bottom up: from sensory signals to knowledge
    • Gustav Fechner
  • top down: the use of knowledge to direct what we perceive (knowing is seeing, conceptual)
    • Ernst Gombrich
      • Based on our personal and cultural knowledge, the beholder forms expectations that help interpret an artwork and direct viewing to salient features
      • All art is illusory and we must build an interpretation of what an artwork represents based on existing knowledge (Schema): art as symbols

Empirical Approaches: Neuroscience

Neuroscientists have studied the workings of the brain from many levels of analysis—from analyses of individual brain cells (i.e., neurons) to the study of neural activity in the human brain. Both structural (anatomical) and functional (brain activity) analyses have been used to investigate the neural correlates of human cognitive function.

• Example: Prefrontal cortex (PFC): It receives inputs from other brain regions and sends projections back to these regions. In this way, the PFC coordinates and controls neural processing: top down processing
• Korbinian Brodmann, 1909: defined 52 distinct areas in cerebral cortex on the basis of physical features, such as size, shape, and density (Brodmann areas).
• Neuropsychological: the study of the relationship between behavior, emotion, and cognition on the one hand, and brain function on the other
  • observing the way damage to different parts of the brain disrupts cognitive function
    • case of Phineas Gage
• Neuroimaging: fMRI: neuroscientists can assess brain activity in specific regions, virtually on a moment-to-moment basis
  • subtraction method: obtain scans from one condition and compare them to scans from another
• Neuroaesthetics
  • Kawabata and ZekiL: Neural correlates of beauty: The orbitofrontal cortex was active when subjects were presented with paintings that they rated as beautiful compared to those rated as neutral.

Issues for Aesthetic Science

Philosophical approaches offer guidelines for scientific investigations of aesthetics.

• mimetic, formalist: perceptual
• expressionist: emotion
• few empirical studies have addressed conceptual approaches to art, studying the role of knowledge in our art experience

beholder: sensation, knowledge, and emotion (SKE)

artist: intention (I) => I-SKE framework