THE AESTHETIC AND SENSUAL IN CULTURE: PAINTING EXPERIENCE AND WINE TASTING IN THE CONCEPTION OF CONNOISSEURSHIP OF MAX FRIEDLÄNDER

Abstract

The article compares the features of sensory and aesthetic perception using the example of wine tasting and expert judgment about the authorship of a work of art from the standpoint of the philosophy of culture. The comparison belongs to the German art historian and theorist of knowledge M. Friedländer (1867–1958). This comparison might seem more conventionally artistic than able to really explain the specifics of aesthetic perception or reasons for the convergence of such cultural phenomena as wine tasting and artistic style, since taste is the most unreliable and most dependent of our senses, in contrast to vision. But the Belgian art theorist T. Lenain shows how a change in the understanding of a work of art (from a normative idealistic approach to a historicist one), firstly, changes our perception of art (which is now understood as a set of imprinted traces – from the cultural characteristics of the era in which the work was created, to the characteristics of the personality of the artist). Secondly, if a work of art grows as a fruit of a certain style and a certain person, then when we perceive it, we see all the features, all manifestations of this style, and we can judge the authorship – just like a true wine specialist will determine its pedigree in just one sip, true connoisseurs are able to recognise the master’s hand at a glance. Thus, the seemingly exotic comparison of the perception of art with the perception of wine becomes quite justified.