We can look at paintings, listen to music, dance, play instruments, and watch movies, on our own almost anytime, anywhere. That is, we have effortless, on-demand access to an abundance of private aesthetic experiences. Why, then, do we seek out aesthetic experiences together? Indeed, it is not controversial to claim that listening to music, dancing, and watching films are activities that we do together more so than we do on our own. While the significance of interpersonal aesthetic experiences, and what (...) explains that significance, is not uncharted territory, I claim that more precision regarding the kinds of relations and interactions that modulate and enable different kinds of interpersonal aesthetic experiences is warranted than is offered in extant literature. As such, an enactive approach that not only foregrounds embodiment and intersubjectivity in cognition, but duly explains how variations in them cause variations in cognition, is paramount to my explanation. Here, then, I marshal three ‘varieties’ of interpersonal aesthetic experience that I term aggregative, synchronised, and shared aesthetic experiences. In doing so, I explain what makes them particularly worthwhile, while introducing terminological and explanatory clarity to the literature as a unifying base from which future research can unfold. (shrink)

The Value of Art Philosophical discourse concerning the value of art is a discourse concerning what makes an artwork valuable qua its being an artwork. Whereas the concern of the critic is what makes the artwork a good artwork, the question for the aesthetician is why it is a good artwork. When we refer to … Continue reading Value of Art →.

Aesthetics and social cognition are two disciplines rarely merged, despite the penetration of artworks into social, moral, and political concerns. In particular, participatory artworks involve direct social interaction and perception, and are more often than not motivated by, and aim towards, ethico-political ends. In the following, I fuse considerations aesthetic with considerations intersubjective, arguing that participatory artworks engage and exploit empathy’s biased character towards a recalibration of our social relationships, namely inclusion and exclusion. Although critics of empathy suggest that its (...) biased, manipulable, and narrow characteristics are detrimental to its moral promise, I argue that participatory artworks are successful intervention methods just insofar as they use these characteristics for their ethico-political gain. This is stimulated by their facilitation of affective, primary intersubjectivity, something I argue is unique to participatory art. After detailing these operations, I suggest that works that seek to address exclusion, rather than those that facilitate inclusion, have a greater potency in addressing and recalibrating empathy, in part owing to their provocation of empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow-feeling such as shame and compassion. (shrink)