Aesthetic Experience in Constructivist Museums

Abstract

Psychical Distance is dead, and Significant Form is in hiding.1 Not that many people care about such arcane aesthetic concepts anymore. This is an era of constructivist meaning-making, dynamic human engagement, and in-yourface social relevance. For American art museums it is a vertiginous period of conflicting goals and identity crises. As interpreters of culture, art museums have had to face tidal waves of revisionist history, postmodern narratives, political correctness, and critical and contextual zealots. As authenticobject oriented institutions, art museums must struggle to remain viable in a techno-culture where virtual worlds proliferate and the veracity of reproduction technology has connoisseurs doing double-takes. As exhibition-oriented institutions, art museums compete with the entertainment industry's special effects teams who continue to up the ante in order to capture a jaded public's attention. As educational institutions, art museums puzzle over how to provide active learning opportunities in an essentially passive hands-off environment. The term paradigm shift has been leveraged so often in attempts to explain the state of art museums that the phrase has become passe. What has become of aesthetic experience amid all the confusion? In the galleries and passageways of art museums aesthetic experience is still referred to with a sense of sacred commitment. And like many things sacred, the concept of aesthetic experience remains largely enshrouded by a mysterious veil of ambiguity. Traditionally it has been taken on faith that people who love art should be left alone to love the artworks, and that the quality of the museum experience will be high provided that the quality of the artwork is high. Unfortunately, the assumption has proved unreliable, that if museum visitors are given sufficient exposure to high quality art, they are inevitably swept up in the indescribable epiphany of an aesthetic experience