Birkbeck Philosophy Society - Summer Term Talk Series: Kris Goffin
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 30 Russell Square
No booking required
Tuesday 16th June 2015 - Kris Goffin
From perceiving colours and shapes to experiencing beauty
In the aesthetic appreciation of paintings and photographs aesthetic properties, such as beauty, ugliness, elegance and gracefulness, are attributed to the picture. Firstly, I will argue that the experience of these aesthetic properties is predominantly emotional and not merely perceptual. If this is true, I need an explanation of how we get from perceiving a picture's colours and shapes to experiencing its gracefulness or beauty. Wollheim argued that the visual experience of a picture is essentially 'twofold' in that you see the colours and shapes of the two-dimensional surface, but you can also see what is depicted. The painter Rothko argued that you can attribute beauty to these two aspects of the picture. In traditional pictorial art you attribute beauty to what is depicted. The beauty of the Rothko's abstract paintings is, however, not attributed to the depicted scene but to the colours and shapes of the two-dimensional surface. I will argue that in the appreciation of most pictures we need to attend to both the depicted scene and the surface. Nanay calls the properties that we experience when we distribute our attention between the depicted scene and the way it is depicted 'design-scene' properties. The function of the art critic is then to encourage spectators to attend to these properties. I want to argue that a Humean interpretation of this phenomenon helps us to understand how to get from perceiving 'design-scene' properties to emotionally experiencing aesthetic properties.