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Abstract
The article argues that current methods for assessing the impact of the arts are largely based on a fragmented and incomplete understanding of the cognitive, psychological and socio-cultural dynamics that govern the aesthetic experience. It postulates that a better grasp of the interaction between the individual and the work of art is the necessary foundation for a genuine understanding of how the arts can affect people. Through a critique of philosophical and empirical attempts to capture the main features of the aesthetic encounter, the article draws attention to the gaps in our current understanding of the responses to art. It proposes a classification and exploration of the factors—social, cultural and psychological—that contribute to shaping the aesthetic experience, thus determining the possibility of impact. The ‘determinants of impact’ identified are distinguished into three groups: those that are inherent to the individual who interacts with the artwork; those that are inherent to the artwork; and ‘environmental factors’, which are extrinsic to both the individual and the artwork. The article concludes that any meaningful attempt to assess the impact of the arts would need to take these ‘determinants of impact’ into account, in order to capture the multidimensional and subjective nature of the aesthetic experience.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England for their support of this research and thank three anonymous referees for their useful suggestions and insightful comments on an earlier draft of the article.
Notes
[1] An introduction to this study can be found in Belfiore and Bennett Citation(2007).
[2] For more on this, please refer to Belfiore and Bennett Citation(in press).
[3] In the context of this article the expression ‘aesthetic experience’ is used as a synonym of ‘artistic experience’, to refer to the individual's encounter and interaction with the work of art. The etymological meaning of the phrase, whereby aesthetics is, in Baumgarten's words, ‘a science of sensual recognition’—or as De Bolla (Citation2002, p. 9) paraphrases, ‘a general enquiry into how we come to know the world from the evidence of our senses’—is for practical reasons, not considered here, as it would extend and complicate the discussion beyond what can be dealt with adequately within the constraints of this article. Indeed, as Arnold Berleant points out, if we were to consider the full etymological implications of the adjective ‘aesthetic’, ‘[t]o the extent that every thing, every place, every event is experienced by an aware body with sensory directness and immediate significance, [everything] … has an aesthetic element’ (qtd in Maclagan, Citation2001, p. 10).
[4] For an extensive discussion of these arguments and the progressive decline of the concept of aesthetic experience—in particular in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophical thinking—see Iseminger Citation(2005) and Shusterman Citation(1997).
[5] Those who argue in favour of the possibility of identifying essentially aesthetic qualities of objects believe that what makes an experience aesthetic is the fact that what is experienced are the aesthetic qualities of a certain object. As Mitias (Citation1988, p. 6) explains, according to this view, in the process of aesthetic perception the experience is ‘infected’ by the aesthetic nature of the object being experienced, thus colouring aesthetically the experience itself. A proponent of this position, Kinsley Price (Citation1979, p. 139), explains that ‘what makes an experience aesthetic is not the awareness in that experience, but some property of its object. The concept ‘aesthetic experience’ finds its character in the fact that it is applied correctly not where awareness is of a certain kind (awareness is always of the same kind), but where the object of awareness is of a certain kind. What makes an experience aesthetic is that it is the experience of an aesthetic object.’ The contentious element here is due to the difficulties in describing precisely and convincingly the nature of such an ‘aesthetic object’.
[6] The term ‘art object’ is used here, and in the rest of the article, in the broad sense that Jennifer Anne McMahon (Citation2001, p. 227) gives to the expression in her exploration of the notion of ‘beauty’: ‘to refer not only to tangible things like paintings and objects of nature, but also to intellectual constructs and temporally extended art works like music and performance’. The various philosophical approaches to understanding art, and consequently the aesthetic experience, that we have briefly discussed here all conceive of the ‘art object’ differently. Yet all find ways to identify art objects and distinguish them from all the other objects present in everyday life and experience. We discuss this in more detail in Belfiore and Bennett Citation(in press).
[7] Obviously, the degree of such engagement varies depending on the thinker considered. We cannot, for reasons of space, discuss this philosophical development in great detail here, but we would refer the reader to chapter 1 of Berleant's Art and Engagement (1991) for a fuller discussion of this notion of experiential continuity in the thought of Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne.
[8] Fenner (Citation2003, p. 40) makes an important point with regards to the shift described by Berleant: ‘[t]he movement from the Taste Theories to those focused on aesthetic experience is not a movement that is over and done with—far from it. There is still (and I think there will always be) a tension between these two very basic aspects of philosophical aesthetics’.
[9] Wolfang Iser (Citation1972, p. 279), one of the founding fathers of reader-response theory, expresses a similar view when he states that ‘the [literary] work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader—though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text’. For Iser, it is precisely in the convergence of text and readers that the literary work comes into existence. For a broader overview of the theories that see reading as part of the process that produces the text, see Storey (Citation1999, chap. 4) and Rosenblatt Citation(1982).
[10] Abercrombie and Longhurst (Citation1998, p. 68ff.) go one step further, and suggest that, due to the pervasive nature of the media in contemporary society, a new form of audience experience is prevalent today. This they refer to as diffused audience. The defining characteristic of this type of audience experience is that ‘everyone becomes an audience all the time. Being a member of an audience is no longer an exceptional event, nor even an everyday event. Rather, it is constitutive of everyday life’. Similarly, Baz Kershaw (Citation1994, pp. 166–167), suggests that we now live in a performative society, ‘in which human transactions are completely structured through the growing use of performative modes and frames’. The implications of such theories would be that a study of the audience experience might ultimately equate to a study of life in contemporary times.
[11] This is, however, a contested view of aesthetic value. Goldman Citation(2006), for example, argues that equating the value of works of art solely—or even primarily—with the experiences they generate ultimately devalues the artworks. For this line of reasoning would lead one to assert that a genuine painting and a forgery have the same value if they are capable of having a similar effect on the viewer, or instigate an equally valuable experience. Goldman suggests that this would be a problematic and ultimately untenable conclusion.
[12] This interpretation of the aesthetic experience as an instance of flow experience has become popular in recent years, probably due to the success of Csikszentmihalyi's work on creativity and his guidebooks on how to achieve happiness by fostering flow in everyday life (see, for instance, Csikszentmihalyi, Citation2002). However, similar definitions of the aesthetic experience have also been put forward by aesthetic theorists. Alan H. Goldman (Citation2006, p. 334), looking back to his past research, summarizes his position as follows: ‘I have characterized [the aesthetic] experience in terms of the simultaneous challenge and engagement of all our mental capacities—perceptual, cognitive, affective, imaginative, even volitional—in appreciation of the relations amongst aspects and elements of artworks. Such engagement creates a rich and intense mental experience imbued with meanings from all these faculties operating in tandem and informing one another.’
[13] By the expression a ‘scientific setting’, we do not refer here just to experimental research carried out in a laboratory, but rather to empirical observations of responses to the arts that strive to fulfil criteria of scientific rigour and objectivity.
[14] Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson Citation(1990) identify four main structural components in the visual artistic experience: a perceptual response that has to do with composition, form, balance, proportion, colours etc.; an emotional response, which has to do with matters of interpretation and reactions to the emotional content of the work of art; an intellectual response that is determined by a focus on the more theoretical and art-historical questions raised by the artwork; and, finally, a communicative response, whereby the work of art is seen as a means to establish a connection of sorts between the individual and the artist's time, place and cultural climate. It is the interplay of these elements that their model of the aesthetic experience is based on. See Eversmann Citation(2004) for an attempt to adapt this model to the interpretation of the theatrical experience.
[15] As a result of changes in the marketplace, companies now have shifted from attempting to sell goods and services to the selling of experiences. This is why the achievement of a better understanding of the mechanisms by which consumer experiences can be enhanced has become central to marketing theory and consumer research in the cultural sphere as much as in other economic sectors (Joy & Sherry, Citation2003, p. 259; Miesen, Citation2004, p. 45).
[16] The popularity of the study of the aesthetic experience in a scientific and experimental setting is demonstrated by the bibliographical review compiled by Norman Kiell Citation(1965) in the mid-1960s and entitled Psychiatry and Psychology in the Visual Arts and Aesthetics: A Bibliography. Here Kiell lists in excess of 7,000 pieces of research, catalogued by topic and author. Yet, one of the criticisms moved against the book concerned omissions and incompleteness in the listing of the literature (Mittleman, Citation1965).
[17] The more recent development of a neurological theory of aesthetic experience (Ramachandran & Hirstein, Citation1999) is a further interesting direction of recent scientific attempts to grasp the artistic experience. A detailed discussion of the distinctive contribution of each of these theoretical approaches to the study of human responses to the arts is beyond the scope of this article. However, Kreitler and Kreitler Citation(1972) offer an extensive and insightful introduction to the psychology of art. Zeki (Citation1999a, Citation1999b) presents a fascinating account of the contribution of neurology and brain science to the explanation of the aesthetic experience, while Young and Saver Citation(2001) look at the neurological aspects of narrative and story-telling. The reader might also find the critique of such scientific approaches to art offered by Carey (Citation2005, chap. 3) relevant and interesting.
[18] The discussion of the difference between consonant and dissonant tones falls beyond the scope of the present article, since it entails tackling the most complex question of ‘why musical harmony sounds harmonious’ (Cazden, Citation1980, p. 123). We would therefore refer the reader to Norman Cazden's article on the difference between musical consonance and dissonance for a full exploration of the problem.
[19] Hochberg lists the golden section among the three ‘most famous prescriptions for beauty in visual art’ (cited in Boselie, Citation1984, p. 367).
[20] See, for instance, Boselie Citation(1984), Godkewitsch Citation(1974) and Plug Citation(1980).
[21] Susan Bennett (Citation1997, especially chap. 3) argues this point compellingly with regards to research into theatrical audiences, and John Tulloch's Citation(2005) interdisciplinary exploration and integration of various methodologies in his study of audiences at theatrical performances also testifies to the need to fill research gaps in this area. Eversmann (Citation2004, p. 149) maintains that ‘a systematic exploration of the theatrical total experience itself is lacking’. This he attributes to the speculative and theoretical nature of the disciplines of aesthetic philosophy and theatre theory, which tend not to rely on empirical data to develop explanations of the theatrical experience; audience research and reception studies, on the other hand, have proved to be narrowly empirical, limiting the analysis to partial aspects of the theatrical experience or to responses to a specific performance. Neither approach seems to have managed to produce a comprehensive and balanced study of the theatrical experience (p. 149).
[22] Victor Nell's Lost in a Book (1988) offers a good, if slightly dated, introduction to the psychology of reading for pleasure.
[23] Carey (Citation2005, p. 73) also criticizes scientific studies that extend to humans observations of animal behaviour of the type discussed earlier, and notes: ‘[a] primary fact about human responses to artworks is that they vary enormously across times, cultures and individuals, so that comparisons with the automatic responses of rats or seagull chicks are obviously inappropriate’.
[24] This is partly because, as Maclagan (Citation2001, p. 12) shows, the nature of ‘feeling’ is itself most complicated: ‘[t]he word is both a noun and a verb, referring to processes of sensation or exploration, as well as to emotion as one possible result of such processes. We do not in fact always know which comes first, the perception or sensation, or the emotional response. Academic psychology may find it convenient to assume that one is stimulus and the other response; but it is often hard to tell whether a particular feeling makes us tune into a specific sense impression, or whether the latter somehow prompts the former. There may be an elusive truth embodied in the fact that the word “feeling” refers to both a process and to its result’.
[25] Eversmann (Citation2004, pp. 150–151) agrees with de Bolla when he suggests that the reluctance to discuss the theatrical experience he observed in his respondents might be linked to people's disinclination to confide their private feelings and emotional reactions to strangers. Yet, he also suggests that his interviewees, many of whom worked in the theatre sector in various capacities, might be more comfortable discussing the economics of producing and touring theatrical performances, their marketing or programming decisions rather than their own response to theatre. This might be, perhaps, according to Eversmann (pp. 150–151), because ‘the function and impact of theatrical events get relatively little attention in the ongoing discourse within the theatre world’.
[26] Despite his disparaging view of emotions, Darwin is credited with one of the earliest attempt in modern science to catalogue the full range of human emotions (Denzin, Citation1984, p. 3)
[27] This suggested neglect of emotions has not been limited to the psychological sciences. As Anderson and Smith (Citation2001, p. 9) point out, ‘social relations are lived through the emotions, but … the emotional qualities of social life have rarely been made apparent within the lexicon of social research’.
[28] Unsurprisingly, Goldie (Citation2000, p. 13) identifies in complexity one of the distinguishing characteristics of emotion.
[29] One of the first academic articles on the topic was penned in Citation1884 by Professor William James and pertinently entitled ‘What is an emotion?’, and the academic debate on the very existence of emotions has been very lively ever since. A forceful negation of the usefulness of the notion of ‘emotion’ in intellectual and scientific enquiry has come from Elizabeth Duffy, whose Citation1941 article on the topic opens with the following statement: ‘[f]or many years the writer has been of the opinion that “emotion,” as a scientific concept, is worse than useless’. Duffy (p. 292) goes on to conclude: ‘I am aware of no evidence for the existence of a special condition called “emotion” which follows different principles of action from other conditions of the organism. I can therefore see no reason for a psychological study of “emotion” as such. “Emotion” has no distinguishing characteristics. It represents merely an extreme manifestation of characteristics found in some degree in all responses. If there is any particular point at which a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind this fact has not been demonstrated’ (emphasis in the original).
[30] Examples of work that explores, from different disciplinary perspectives, the emotional dimension of artistic production and reception that were consulted as part of this research project are: the special issue of Poetics (Vol. 23, Nos. 1 & 2) devoted to the theme ‘Emotions and Cultural Products’; Boruah Citation(1988); Coplan Citation(2004); Kivy Citation(2006); the essays contained in Hjort and Laver Citation(1997); Oatley and Jenkins (Citation1996, pp. 365–374); Wood and Smith Citation(2004); Yanal Citation(1999).
[31] In fact, Nozick Citation(1968) goes on to argue that even if such an ‘experience machine’ existed, there still would be much of other people's inner world of experience that we would be unable to grasp.
[32] Things are further complicated by the fact that for certain activities—such as, for instance, reading for pleasure—temporality is built into the experience. Feagin (Citation1996, p. 31) points out that literary appreciation is a temporally extended activity: ‘one progresses through a novel sequentially, and readers are only gradually exposed to various structural features, plot developments, and revelations of characters. … The fact that reading takes time structures the very possibilities inherent in (and the values of) our involvement with and experience of the medium—in short our appreciation of it’. John Tulloch (Citation2005, p. 7) makes a similar point with regards to theatrical performances, when he maintains that ‘an audience participates in a performance processually, across a changing temporality before, during, and (sometimes long) after the performance’.
[33] It is also important to remember that, precisely in the same way in which responses to the arts are to a significant degree shaped by accepted socio-cultural norms, also the study of that response will take place within similarly constructed accepted notions of what the arts are and how they (and their effects) ought to be studied. For an interesting example of this, see Tompkins' Citation(1980) historical review of changing notions of literature and literary response from Ancient Greece to the present day.
[34] Crucially, in the same way in which accepted responses to the arts are culturally and historically shaped, the art forms themselves are also determined by the culture and social norms of a certain historical period. See for instance, what Sparshott (Citation1997, p. 122) says of dance: ‘[d]ance, if anything, is a culturally emergent entity. Even if there is dance in every society, and even if there are physical and social and psychological constants in human life that account for the universality of dance, what dance is in any culture or historical epoch is always something unique to its time and place, historically determined, conceptualized in ways inseparable from the ways and views of the dancers and their reference groups, and assigned meanings peculiar to the society and culture’. Obviously, a similar case could be made for all other art forms and sub-genres.
[35] A plausible explanation of the reason why a negative review is likely to have a stronger impact on audiences than a positive one might be that negative information in general has more influence than positive information: ‘[n]egative information is more surprising, attracts more attention and it appears less ambiguous’ (Boorsma & van Maanen, Citation2003, p. 329).
[36] In brief, this consists of eliciting comments and debate from various groups, each composed of around seven theatre-goers, shortly after a performance. The discussion is lead by a researcher, who is in charge of stimulating the debate whilst reducing to a minimum his or her own engagement in it (Sauter, Citation2000, p. 176ff.).
[37] Studies on reading preferences seem to suggest that the plot is also important in determining the quality of young people's reading experiences (Fisher, Citation1994, pp. 59–63).
[38] The extent to which children are likely to be affected by violence witnessed through literature and the media has been at the centre of a heated debate for decades. Notions of ‘copycat behaviour’ (Bondora & Goodwin, Citation2005; Pirkis & Blood, Citation2001) and the theorisation of the so-called ‘Werther effect’ (Phillips, Citation1985) being just examples of the research that has been carried out in this area. This extensive body of literature cannot, for reasons of space, be discussed satisfactorily here. However, it is important to point out that a body of material rejecting the allegedly damaging influence of violence in the media upon children has also been developed (see for instance, Barker & Petley, Citation1997), giving rise to a lively debate on the ‘ill effects’ (Barker & Petley, Citation1997) of violent media products on children.
[39] The report also notes, however, that once people reach retirement age, participation levels tend to drop, so that while, in 2003, 84 per cent of those aged 45–54 attended at least one cultural event in the past year, the percentage drops to 47 per cent for individuals aged 75 and over (Office for National Statistics, Citation2005, p. 87).
[40] Arts Council England's 2004 study of arts attendance in England confirms this (2004, p. 37).
[41] Flynn (Citation1983, p. 236) points out, that while extensive empirical research has been carried out on the reading preferences and behaviour of school-age children and adolescents, we know very little about the reading patterns of mature readers (of both sexes).
[42] Usherwood and Toyne Citation(2002) however identify escapism as a prime motivation for reading in both male and female readers.
[43] We are grateful to Mariaelisa Santonastaso, a doctoral student at the Institute of Health and Community Studies at Bournemouth University for pointing us towards useful references for this section of the article.
[44] Richard A. Shweder (Citation1993, p. 417) defines the purpose of the field of ‘cultural psychology’ as follows: ‘[t]he major goals of cultural psychology are to spell out the implicit meanings that give shape to psychological processes, to examine the distribution of those meanings, across ethnic groups and temporal-spatial regions of the world, and to identify the manner of their social acquisition’.
[45] Anna Wierzbicka (Citation1999, p. 123ff.) argues that angst is indeed ‘a peculiarly German concept. The fact that this word has been borrowed and is used in English for a different range of situations, highlights the sui generis meaning of the German Angst’.
[46] Markus Citation(1991), for example, explains that many Asian cultures share a notion of individuality that emphasizes the idea of ‘relatedness’ of individuals to each other. This entails the importance, in those cultures, of looking after relatives and friends, of trying to fit in and live in harmony with the other members of the community. American culture, by contrast, attributes less value to the idea of the interrelatedness of people, and values more individuals who strive to maintain their independence form others, look after themselves and strive for self-expression.
[47] It will not come as a surprise, then, that one of the ‘untranslatables’ referred to above should be the Japanese notion of ‘amae’, which indicates a pleasant feeling of dependence on someone and has no equivalent term in the English language.
[48] An inevitable corollary of the discussion presented here is that in the same way in which the aesthetic experience is not universal but is affected by cultural conditioning and shaped by the intellectual and psychological categories of one's culture, so is any exploration of the aesthetic encounter. Therefore, despite its ambition for academic rigour and scientific objectivity, the present enquiry into the aesthetic encounter is itself—ineluctably—born out of the research protocols and the intellectual horizon of Western academia.
[49] In addition to the audience surveys cited so far, see: Aschaffenburg and Maas Citation(1997), Bennett Citation(2005), Bourdieu Citation(1984), Chan and Goldthorpe Citation(2005), Di Maggio Citation(1996), Katz-Gerro Citation(1999), Morrison and West Citation(1986) and Roberts Citation(2004).
[50] McComb, Weatherly & Van Eijck (Citation1997, p. 197) summarize the concept of cultural capital as follows: ‘[c]ultural capital refers to good taste, appropriate manners, cognitive sophistication, and knowledge of, and receptivity to, legitimate cultural products (such as art, classical music, theatre and literature)’.
[51] Like ‘cultural capital’, the notion of ‘cultural competence’ was also first elaborated by Bourdieu Citation(1993), who defines it as follows: ‘[a]rtistic competence is … defined as the previous knowledge of the strictly artistic principles of division which enable a representation to be located, through the classification of the stylistic indications which it contains, among the possibilities of representations constituting the universe of art and not among the possibilities of representation constituting the universe of everyday objects or the universe of signs, which would amount to treating it as a mere monument, i.e. as a mere means of communication used to transmit a transcendent signification’ (pp. 221–222). At the heart of cultural competence is the capacity to read a work of art and note its distinctive stylistic features in relation to the ensemble of the artworks that belong to the same category. This capacity, in turn, requires an early exposure to the arts and regular later engagement with them, previous knowledge and intellectual sophistication—or, in other words, cultural capital.
[52] We would suggest, however, that in the contemporary cultural context, the issue of competence is not limited to the traditional high arts. Certain forms of contemporary artistic creation, such as digital art, or even certain forms of popular music (e.g. hip hop and rap) have their own codes that have to be mastered if the specific cultural object is to be fully understood, and therefore require their own brand of cultural competence. Similarly, writing about ‘media competence’, Abercrombie and Longhurst (Citation1998, p. 119) note that ‘[m]odern societies take the media so much for granted that it is easy to forget that the appropriation of the media also does involve the learning of skills of various kinds’.
[53] Miesen (Citation2004, p. 53) refers to the work of Whissel, who has conducted an analysis of differences in word usage between romance and adventure novels. Her work reveals that romance novels tend to employ more commonly used words and present more word repetitions than adventure novels. Hence, Mieser's suggestion that, linguistically, romances are less complex than literary novels and require less effort from the reader.
[54] See, for instance, the empirical research carried out by Reason (Citation2006, p. 229) on young people's experiences of live theatre, and how one of the predominant and most recurring memories of the interviewees was ‘of the large and glitzy chandelier hanging in the centre of the auditorium’. It is clear from Reason's work that the glamour of the theatre had both an exciting and intimidating effect on the young audience.
[55] It should be noted that Carey himself does not appear wholly convinced of his own conclusion on this issue. Having spent a good half of his What Good are the Arts? (2005) on denying the possibility of making judgements, or even forming opinions, on others' encounters with the arts, he then delivers a peroration on the transformative and ameliorative effects that reading fiction has on young offenders, confidently pronouncing (but in clear contradiction of his own premise) on their emotional involvement in the novels and their inner reception of them.