Understanding and Appreciating Art: The Relevance of Experience

Abstract

Art forms as we know them today, and also the theoretical and interpretative discourses on the arts that include the key concepts in the philosophy of art, emerged at the end of the eighteenth century through a process of social and cultural de-differentiation. Art and the aesthetic were gradually established as a seemingly autonomous and self-contained realm of human activity and concern. The detachment of art from a political and religious framework was a precondition not only for the emergence and development of the modern system of the arts, but also for the rise of modern philosophy of art and for the distinctly modern preoccupation with works of art as autonomous aesthetic objects.' With different motivations and varying accents, certain artistic and intellectual movements-in particular formalist movements, from Russian formalism to the New Criticism and French structuralism-have lent support to the view that art and works of art form a separate reality, as it were, the understanding and appreciation of which require a distinctive vocabulary and specific methods. The motivations for according a special status to art and works of art vary: sometimes the motivation has been narrowly artistic and aesthetic, as in the l'art pour l'art movement; sometimes it has been scientific, as in Russian formalism and French structuralism. These endeavors have, however, had similar effects: the erection of a barrier between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic, between art and nonart, and between the ways of understanding art and comprehending other spheres of reality. I do not wish to deny that formalist approaches to art, concentrating as they do on the artwork itself and its formal and structural properties, can illuminate certain aspects of works of art; but I do not believe that any kind of formalist or structuralist or, for that