What makes an experience aesthetic?

All the time we are awake life is marked by experience. The world gives us sensations and situations to respond to, we react, and the world reacts back. This ongoing transaction fills our days.

But some experiences are more rewarding than others. Experiences tend to run the spectrum from boring and barely worth our attention—to scattered, incomplete and unsatisfying—to routine (whether mindless routine or pleasantly familiar routine)—to busy and focused (with various levels of challenge and satisfaction)—to those that are the most engaging, even radiating with meaning and purpose, lifting you up, making you feel truly alive. These are the kind you want to keep with you.

The experiences filled with meaning are the ones we can refer to as aesthetic. These set the bar. In fact, they inspire the practice of art (which, fundamentally, is our way of distilling experience), inspire people to strive for the highest achievements in all domains, and keep us going through the routine, hard work, or boredom we inevitably experience along the way. Just knowing aesthetic experiences are out there to be had can be inspiration enough to resisting slipping into the doldrums.

The connection of engaging everyday experiences to art and aesthetics was made most famously by philosopher John Dewey in his 1934 work, Art as Experience. There, he explored the question of the source of art in human behavior, and saw it as originating in everyday experience, ranging from “how the tense grace of the ball-player infects the on-looking crowd; . . . the delight of the housewife in tending to her plants . . .; the zest of the spectator in poking the wood burning on the hearth and in watching the darting flames and crumbling coals.”

Photo by Lukas Riebling

What can these everyday experiences have in common with the David of Michelangelo, Picasso’s Guernica, Debussy’s Preludes, Malick’s Days of Heaven, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina? The answer has to do with a few critical qualities of experiences that drive us toward the reward of meaningful engagement.

Including the encounters with works of art that we love, but definitely not restricted to these, aesthetic experiences have a coherence—a beginning, middle, and end—that sets them apart from the normal flow of experience. This begins with an intention based on (a) a need, desire, tension, or puzzlement that stimulates attention, an attention that is further driven by (b) the anticipation of a meaningful outcome that makes the experience compelling—winning the game, a garden full of flowers, a warm fire. These experiences are also colored by (c) deep engagement and concern for (d) immediate actions and sensual details, and not just thoughts about reasons and purposes, which may in fact be temporarily forgotten, like time itself. Finally, unlike much of our experience, which can feel incomplete or lacking in some way, an aesthetic experience includes (e) a conclusion or consummation, a resolution that ties all the moments of the experience together--gives it coherence--and makes the effort (which often includes hard work) worth it. Moreover, the resolution often feels profoundly meaningful. Nearly all good narratives have such a pattern, and non-narrative art can create the same experience within us, but many everyday experiences show this pattern as well.

Each of these qualities require more unpacking and exploration, as does the overall quality of coherence, and might be the subject of future posts. But for now, let’s conclude by examining a couple experiences to show how one is aesthetic, and one is definitely not, and also look at the contributing factors.

It would be easy to choose two highly contrasting situations, like climbing a mountain and washing windows, for example, but let’s choose very similar situations in an environment where where experiences tend to exhibit a wide range of aesthetic engagement—the workplace. The situations described below are fictitious, and any resemblance to real situations, current or past, is purely coincidental.

1.
You are asked to take on a new work assignment. You have no lack of work, so at first you wince at the request. But you trust the person asking for it (manager or client, take your pick), know that the assignment is not a whim, and as you study the details, you agree it has value and will bring multiple benefits. You also see some interesting challenges that will offer you an opportunity to learn new things, so you say yes. Your first task is to decide on the approach you will take, which will require buy-in by the stakeholders. Through careful examination of the goals, the stakeholder needs, the constraints, and similar assignments taken on by colleagues, you are able to develop both a good plan and a good argument for it. The buy-in is achieved after a series of challenges that force you to defend the approach. As you begin to implement the plan, you become convinced that the outcome would be improved if you adapt your approach, and this creative problem solving is enjoyable enough to compel you to work late many nights. When you deliver the final result, it is well received, but not without some additional modifications. You think back to when you were first given the assignment and how it has evolved, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment to know that you were able to see it through this evolution. You also look forward to seeing how what you learned during the project will help you in future efforts, and perhaps win you additional interesting and challenging assignments.

I hope this scenario was not too unfamiliar, but certainly most workplace experiences don’t reach this level. Let’s rewind and look at the other end of the spectrum.

2.
You are asked to take on a new work assignment. You have no lack of work, and so you wince at the request. The person asking you (manager or client, take your pick) has a reputation for quickly responding to upper management requests with half-baked ideas for the sake of quick compliance. You feel that this might be one of those black-hole assignments, one that will take excessive time and energy, but give back little and have little chance of success. You are told the plan and given little leverage to adapt it with your own ideas, so you cannot help but feel a lack of conviction when you have to present it to the stakeholders. Predictably, it is shot full of holes by the skeptics who offer no alternatives, and equally so by supporters who have completely different (and better) ideas that might have more impact. Trying to please everyone, you allow the plan to become a mélange that will hopefully address everyone’s input. Before the plan can be implemented, management stalls, unable to see how it could address their original goals, which have changed anyway. No one cancels it, but no one pushes for it either, and so it withers away and is eventually forgotten. You move on to hopefully better projects.

I suspect we have all had such experiences in our work, unfortunately. Aesthetic experiences are hard to come by, especially when critical contributing factors are lacking. What are these factors?

Some have to do with things that are mostly outside our control, the Situational qualities, and some have to do with the ones we bring to the experience, our Individual qualities. The diagram below depicts a rather good day/week/month without boredom or scattered activity, and lists the qualities that make it good. But note that, as novelists since modernist times have shown us, experience is not really a timeline, and aesthetic experiences are not just moments we can mark in time. Sometimes only with time does it dawn on us how meaningful an experience has become, perhaps even long after the events have concluded.

From Parrish, Wilson, and Dunlap (2010)

Qualities of Situations

Immediacy. Some situations absorb us their details--not just sights and sounds to perceive, but also ideas to comprehend, emotions to feel, and tasks to accomplish. Immediacy takes our focus away from ourselves and to the world itself.

Malleability. Some experiences allow give and take–the opportunity for us to color the experience, to shape it with the tools we bring to it, and to contribute to its unfolding. The most powerful situations are provisional, with the final meaning and outcomes to be determined at least partly by us.

Compellingess. A compelling situation contains intrigue and uncertainty. It makes us curious about what happens or can happen next. We are reluctant to let it go.

Resonance. Some experiences both connect to our present lives and leave a residue of thoughts and feelings that have an impact on future experiences. Sometimes they recast the past with new understanding. Aesthetic experiences create reverberant echoes in all directions.

Coherence. When life moves from one thing to another without connection, the disjointedness is unraveling. Coherence, on the other hand, is almost synonymous with meaning, and it is most powerful if it emerges when we are following through on an intention. In fact, the most rewarding kind of coherence is one that is not just given--like an easily perceived symmetry, but one that requires a struggle before being revealed.

Qualities of Individuals

Intent. Each of us has individual goals and interests, as well as unique attitudes, values, hopes, beliefs, likes, dislikes, and assumptions about our role in the world. All of these are subsumed by the concept of intent by phenomenologists like Husserl (1982/1999). While our intentions exist in any case, when we are aware of and honest about our intentionality, we are also more open to the influence of experience and more able to gain from it. This is perhaps especially when it challenges us.

Presence. As Woody Allen aptly put it, 80 percent of success is showing up. I agree, but to achieve an experience that reaches aesthetic proportions we need something beyond physical and mental presence. The other “twenty percent” includes empathy and being genuine, which are a little bit harder to achieve. These three types of presence are called being-there, being-with, and being-one’s-self by philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962). Presence makes us more responsible, able to draw on our pasts and utilize our will to imagine and change our future.

Openness. In American politics, openness is called being a flip-flopper, as if it is shameful to admit you can still learn from experience. Aesthetic experiences, if we want them, demand an openness to submit to the challenges offered and draw upon the opportunities of the situation and the perspectives and support of others to learn new things. This is not flip-flopping, this is integrity.

Trust. To fully engage in a situation, we need to trust that it has something to offer. This includes faith that positive outcomes can occur – along with the willingness to suspend disbelief when these outcomes are in doubt – and forgiveness when the experience falls short of expectations, knowing that with effort, it can be turned around.

This list of aesthetic-potential qualities is probably not exhaustive, and the qualities are certainly not independent of each other. But hopefully they are compelling and coherent enough to keep this line of inquiry going, which is all that is needed. Do your favorite works of art have these qualities? When you enjoy them, do you bring your individual qualities to the experience? Does your work ever rise to this level?

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Portions of this post are based on Learning Experience as Transaction: A Framework for Instructional Design (Parrish, Wilson, and Dunlap, 2010)

Cooking and Eating

Last night, my wife was going to arrive home late for dinner due to her French class. That could have been an excuse for preparing a simple snack or leftovers, but we almost always choose to avoid that kind of eating after a long work day because it makes us feel a little depressed, to be honest. Like many people, we enjoy taking time to cook, to prepare something significant, perhaps simple, but still elegant, even when time is not in our favor. In some way, the day just does not feel complete without it. On weekend nights, with more time, even if it never seems to be a luxurious amount, the options are wide open, and on occasion we might spend two hours or more in preparation of something more special.

So I prepared a meal last night anyway, but I needed to keep it light since we would be eating so late. I tried something common to many people, Baba Ghanoush (that wonderful paté common in Middle Eastern cuisine), but which I not have prepared more than a couple times, so the novelty was motivation. It is also somewhat simple, but the process takes time and attention. I peel and roast 2 small eggplants (or aubergine as they are known here in Geneva), drenched in extra virgin olive oil and salted, to begin. While the eggplants relax and enrich their flavor in the oven, with only minimal attention required to turn them periodically, it is time to prepare the additional ingredients. Skipping the traditional tahini, which I did not have, I dice capers and spring onions (or szypior, as Maja is used to naming them in Polish) to add some bite. The process of chopping and dicing is quite enjoyable once one gets comfortable with the knife, in fact. The focus and skill required to avoid injuring the fingers and making even cuts is worth developing. The rest of the dish was roasted garlic (we prefer this over raw garlic), fresh lemon juice, parsley and cumin powder (fresh ground in this case). After the eggplant is soft, I blend all these things together in a food processor until it is very smooth, heavier than whipped cream, but similar. Then I just have to prepare a simple side salad and slice some bread.

Photo by young shanahan, copyright Creative Commons

One of the enjoyable and rewarding things about cooking is the potential for endless variation and creative opportunities, as well as the pleasure of using the materials at hand efficiently and to interesting effect. Even one ingredient substituted, or a vegetable sliced thinner or thicker, might have a noticeable effect on the final dish. When trying a new dish, we on occasion use a recipe religiously, but that is rare. Personalization is a key to getting the full enjoyment out of the experience.

We like going out to restaurants for a different kind experience, but we sometimes come away feeling we can do better. Maybe this is true, but maybe it is also just that we miss the process of preparation. After a long day of email communication, meetings, drafting documents and plans, and the inevitable general bureaucratic steps (and crevasses) required to work within the international organizations we are part of, cooking is almost a form of meditation.

It was a warm night, so we ate on the balcony, overlooking the lake, with candles, nice place settings, the sound of soft waves hitting the rocks, and also the background noise we have learned to overlook, the parade of evening planes from countries all over the world heading for the Geneva Airport to land. We see an Emirates plane, and wonder if they ate Baba Ghanoush during their journey as well, and whether it was as good as ours.

The qualities of cooking mentioned above--infinite creative options, requisite dexterity, a focus on process, a body of jargon, specialized tools, visceral enjoyment of the final product--surely qualify cooking as a high craft. And experts chefs are given the recognition that high level craftsman deserve. But does food deserve to be called an artform?

 As mentioned in a previous post, I don’t feel this question is profitable. It leads to many strange arguments. One is that the fact that food is ephemeral makes it unlike most art forms. But isn’t this also true of musical and dance performances? And many visual arts as well, such as Tibetan sand paintings and the outdoor natural arts of Andy Goldsworthy. Another is that food is consumable, for sustenance and not pure enjoyment, so it lacks the “enjoyment for its own sake” that other arts demonstrate. But then there is architecture, and the point that enjoyment is also a useful purpose. Food, and its preparation, offers the opportunity for aesthetic experience, and this is the point, not whether we can call it art. We can anticipate its pleasures, we can become highly engaged in the processes of preparation and eating, it can generate curiosity due to its variety, it is immediately experienced and not just something for intellectual thought, and it can bring about a profound feeling of closure, one felt even in the body as the stomach is satisfied. It is these things that make cooking and eating aesthetic.

Preparing food for oneself and for family and friends provides several levels of nourishment. First is the aesthetic pleasure of crafting a good meal. Second is the physical nourishment of the meal, but also, thirdly, its aesthetic appreciation when eaten. And finally, there is the joy in sharing what one has prepared with others.

Learning is an aesthetic experience

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Do you recall when you learned to ride a bicycle? At first, accomplishing the feat may have seemed impossible—the balance required, the embarrassing and potentially dangerous threat of falling, the frighteningly unfamiliar speed required to stay upright (a lot faster than walking, and even faster than running). Riding in a car was faster, but completely different. On a bike, it was just you and the simple but still amazing contraption beneath you, completely under your control. Your legs did the peddling, your arms did the steering, your sense of balance—that finely tuned sensation of how your body was positioned within gravity, kept the both of you vertical, at least until the speed took over. Then some magical gyroscopic synthesis took over, but only gradually did you discover this synthesis.

Photo by C.Schubert, copyright Creative Commons

While you learned, at least after the training wheels were removed or your parent stepped back, you fell. Probably more than once. But each time you got on the bike, it felt a little more comfortable. You gained a little more confidence, greater balance, and the distance before you crashed increased. Eventually, you wondered what the big deal was, why it seemed so hard. It became second nature, just another one of the growing number of skills that increased your opportunities. The world became bigger now that you could get places faster. Even if your parents insisted you stay in your neighbourhood at first, you could now navigate it like never before. You felt invigorated!

Now think about your mastery of your mother tongue or tongues. You probably do not remember mastering speech and understanding your parent’s speech. It was too much a part of your growing consciousness to be separated from you becoming you. Your speech and your awareness in general came about together. But you probably do remember learning to read and write.

This was much harder than learning to ride a bicycle. It took much more time to feel any sense of mastery. In fact, like most of us, you are probably still learning new reading skills, new subtleties of language that increase your mastery—new words, things about usage you overlooked, differences in dialect, etc. At first, you learned how to spell single, common words, and the association between the letters L-O-O-K and the word that describes the intentional act of seeing was perhaps a revelation even greater than balancing a moving bicycle.

Learning to read and write took concerted effort, and for many of us, external motivation in the form of a demanding parent or teacher. But once you had mastered the basics, like being able to read the children’s books that up to that point had to be read to you by another, you may have experienced a profound curiosity, knowing that all those books surrounding you on bookshelves in your home, at the library, and in bookstores represented new worlds to explore. So you pushed yourself to be able to explore them. There were newspapers, magazines, novels, and works of non-fiction. For many there were also religious texts, more difficult with their archaic language. There were the notes left to you by your parents and teacher or passed to you by friends in class. Slowly, you developed the skills to enjoy the classics or just the more advance works covering your hobbies or other areas of interests. With effort came rewards.

Photo by Lynn Friedman, copyright Creative Commons

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Can such learning experiences be considered aesthetic? What do they have in common with the things that typically come to mind when we hear that word? Well, consider your favorite books or movies, and although it might take more effort, also think about your favorite paintings. While your experiences with them might have felt effortless, it was deep engagement that made them feel that way. Learning and the effort it entails is an essential aspect of any aesthetic experience, even if the learning sometimes has a subtler and abstract nature, and is not related to developing practical skill or knowledge.

Most of these experiences with fine arts, if not all, were also acts of learning. The content they offered represented processes of learning, and your experience of enjoying them was also a process of learning. This might be most obvious in the popular mystery and detective fiction genres, where the act of discovery is an explicit plot device. Just consider the lasting popularity of Sherlock Holmes, due in large part that we learn as Sherlock learns, with his special powers of deduction guiding us and encouraging us. It is also obvious in much older forms, like fables and fairy tales, with the moral and practical lessons they offer. And consider the enjoyment we get from learning about foreign places and historic times (or speculations of the future) from other genres.

Let’s also consider some less obvious examples. Narratives are often diagrammed by the use of an incline that depicts rising action or rising plot complication, building through three acts (based on Aristotle’s Poetics). This rising action is almost without fail also accompanied by, or created by, increasing knowledge. For Aristotle, a prime example is Oedipus Rex, the story of an overconfident king who slowly learns how his pride or hubris is a large contributor to the playing out of his fate.


But the incline is just as apt in explaining more contemporary works, like the international best-seller, The DaVinci Code (Brown, 2003). There is a clear, rising complication in Act One as the main character, Langdon, becomes the key suspect in a mysterious murder and he and his colleague, Sophie, begin following puzzling clues to get at the truth. In Act Two (the “Acts” are being defined by me, not the author), the complication deepens as the purpose and machinations of a conspiracy become apparent. In this act, the protagonists must work to protect themselves, but also find proof of the unexpected story of the Holy Grail. In Act Three, an even deeper conspiracy is revealed, and the protagonists learn they have a critical role to play in resolving the situation. The plot of The DaVinci Code is carried forward by a series of revelations—the supposed truth of the Holy Grail, the existence of a conspiracy (at two levels), and the truth of Sophie’s identity. In other words, increasing knowledge drives the action as much as outward events.

		Act 3
		The conspiracy is foiled. The Sophie and Langdon learn a final truth about the Grail in Scotland, and decide not to reveal it.
	Act 2
	Further clues are discovered in London. A larger conspiracy is revealed. We learn of Sophie’s potential link to the Grail.
Act 1
A mysterious and gruesome murder is discovered at the Louvre. The protagonist, Langdon, is the main suspect, but escapes to follow clues in search for the true murderer.

Now, it might be argued that The Da Vinci code is merely detective fiction in disguise, but consider a more subtle work of fiction. In another recent novel, Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro, 2005), the author uses a first-person narrator whose initial naiveté allows a satisfactory understanding of the situation to be only slowly revealed. There are no dramatic moments of revealed truth as there are in The DaVinci Code—only a growing and never complete understanding of truth. This is probably a more realistic depiction of how we come to answers to the big questions of life, and it is what gives the novel its surprising power and narrative sophistication. The narrator’s knowledge grows during three parts, separated chronologically by several years, and if the novel engages us, this process of deepening knowledge deepens our appreciation.

Most theorists, critics, and creative writing instructors would argue that without some growth in the characters, meaning some increasing knowledge about themselves and/or the world they live in, a narrative is flat. The most exciting action-laden plot does not make up for a lack of character development. Even clichéd character growth pasted onto to an otherwise shallow, action-laden plot can sometimes work with audiences. Can you think of a successful narrative plot that does not involve learning of some sort, or at minimum, an explicit accusation of the failure of a character to learn?

Finally, let’s consider a work of visual art with much less obvious connections to learning. Monet’s series of haystack paintings provide a good example. Monet was fascinated with how the changing quality of light during the day and across seasons changes the colors we see. He and the other Impressionists learned through experiment that what we see (physically) and what we perceive are not exactly the same. We might not register the color changes of a scene through the day, but they are there. His paintings, especially those like the haystack series helped to demonstrate this, beautifully. He also noted that we do not see pure colors, but distinct colors mixed to form the final colors we perceive. Grey is never grey exactly, but can be a mixture of many colors that our eyes perceive together as grey, so artist are free to create the perception of a color by juxtaposing very different colors. Monet learned about colors by making the paintings, and we learn about colors by observing them.

Every good painting or work of visual art is in a way an experiment designed for learning. This might appear especially true in today’s era of conceptual art, but even commercial portraitists learn about their subjects’ appearances as they work. A landscape painter is exploring the landscape and her perception of it through painting, not just reproducing it. We begin to see our world in new ways based on the work artists show us. Our opinions of what makes a beautiful landscape are influenced largely by the works of art we have seen.

In a similar way, music provides many of the rhythms of our lives, and we learn pacing at least partially from which music we choose. Melodies, like narratives, let us know how to find closure. Music also teaches us emotion, and maybe not always the reverse, as is assumed.

Collecting

What do you collect? What do you keep about you that rewards you just in the keeping?

I have never considered myself to be a collector, but not for a lack of trying. I have gathered lots of things over the years, but I have also discarded most of them. There is a coin collection, made up of random international coins and quite a few U.S. coins. Yet they all fit into one small box that was easy enough to fit in one of my suitcases when I moved to Europe. The stamp collection is even smaller (collecting it lightly occupied me for about 1 year as a young teenager), with just a few inspired or opportunistic additions more recently. That is all as far as traditional collections go.

On the nontraditional side, I have about 15 half-liter bags of sand of different colors, from black to pink to almost white, from different beaches around the world. These are meant for a future artwork of some kind, but they function more like a collection, just sitting there for now.

Should I include movies and music? If so, then perhaps I underestimate myself. However, my iPod is less then half full at 60 Mb of music. How many days would it take to listen to all of that music? Well, on a long drive a few years ago (just under 1000 miles/1600 km), I started to listen to all my songs—in alphabetical order. I barely made it into the B’s during the return trip. So maybe that makes it a collection.

I am a lover of film, and yet my DVD’s fit into a small cabinet and just a few boxes in the basement cage beneath my Versoix apartment. iTunes holds more, but these amount to just over a hundred. How many days would they take to watch? Well, I suspect I could suffer a serious broken leg and not run out of films for a while. Do I need this many movies and this much music when I have Netflix, Spotify, TV and radio? They mostly sit idle, so perhaps these also comprise a collection. Yet like all collections, they somehow assert a power, a potential.

And then there are books. I forgot to mention that I have a small but not insubstantial number of cookbooks, even though I rarely use them anymore, preferring spontaneous creations with web search inspiration. I also have books about the countries I have visited or want to visit, but my books on art and film are the most substantial category. I do not care to calculate how much they cost to ship to Europe, but I do refer to them from time to time, which makes it worthwhile (more than just a lurking power). The books line 3 large bookshelves, but many also remain in boxes locked in the cellar cage, like most of the DVDs, and the LPs I forgot to mention.

As I write, I am looking at the line of plants (flowers and herbs) at the edge of my balcony. Additional dried herbs and spices in the kitchen occupy one large tray near the stove (those most used), and one additional drawer containing less often used Mexican chilis and the curry mixes that were spontaneous purchases (and will eventually by thrown out in preference to freshly made ones).

I became curious, and found that I have 9,909 photos in my iPhotos collection since I began using it in 2012. That is approximately 2500 per year. Before that, I did not count, but I have an external hard drive somewhere with an equal number of photos, no doubt. And there are boxes of traditional printed photos as well, as yet un-digitized, and therefore innumerable.

I live in a small apartment, or I would collect more I suppose. It is our nature.

Collections are a passion for many people. They collect memorabilia related to sports or other disciplines, or items generally representing certain decades, forms of fine and folk art (some of which are produced specifically to be collected, and even numbered to help collectors). Some collect common souvenirs from as many places as possible (pins, buttons, spoons, postcards, refrigerator magnets, shells, etc.), specifically named “souvenirs” for their power to recall events and places visited. Souvenirs can hold power even if the visit was made by family or friends—it is still a connection. Some are more interested in collecting the places themselves, and do so with photos, air tickets, or just memories. Many tourists rush to visit as many famous places as possible for the photo opportunities they present during their too brief holidays. While I try to avoid that kind of travel myself, I do have an up-to-date Virtual Tourist map that shows I have visited 38 countries and all 50 US states. I keep count at Virtual Tourist. Some put pins in a physical map.

And that is part of the fun of collecting I suppose, counting what you have and hold. Collecting is a way of getting your hands around some aspect of life—of quantifying it and also possessing it. Collecting can help you learn, leading to new knowledge through comparisons of the things you collect (consider the natural philosophers’ collections of fossils), and deepening your understanding of a particular facet of life. Collections also can support identity-building through maintaining a connection with something meaningful to you and to others with similar interests--which can help build a learning community. Collecting is an aesthetic activity, offering no personal gain (see the disinterest theory of art), frequently based on a desire to engage with life within a manageable scope.

Artists also collect at times. Writers and filmmakers may create story collections centered around a theme, such as Kieslowski's Decalogue and Three Colors series, Wallace Steven's poems, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, or Monet's haystack series of paintings under different lighting conditions. Some contemporary visual artists have made the act of collecting a subject of their work.  

Collecting begins in childhood, perhaps because it is a natural and intuitive activity. We might collect stones, cards, toy soldiers or stuffed animals. Maybe this desire was born out of the need to collect food and water, or raw materials useful for survival—hoarding for winter, perhaps. If this is its source, it has evolved to become more about meaning. Some collections are composed of things from outside everyday experience, things that bring the remote closer (stamps, coins, minerals, historic items, rare minerals). Alternatively, some collections are composed of things representing notable personal experiences that one wants to recall (photos, awards, souvenirs, autographs, jewelry, or even the chocolate wrappers and beer cans recalling other pleasures). Others represent exquisite examples, works of great craftsmanship and effort (art itself, but also finely designed practical objects, and even the tools for creating them). But others are just about enumerating some subset of innumerable things (from butterfly collections to stones and grains of sand).

 These four categories, the exotic, the personally meaningful, the exquisite, and the innumerable, do cover a lot of ground, but I suspect they are not exhaustive. I will conclude with a list (a collection) of additional things not already mentioned directly that might also qualify as collections, fitting in these categories for the most part, but suggesting others perhaps. Even if such a list could never be complete, it is interesting to consider the range of possibilities.

• Animal and bird sightings: Many people expend significant effort to record their sightings of animals, trying to collect as many as possible. On African safaris, the goal is to see the “Big 5” most dangerous animals. For birders, the ultimate sighting goal is one that can never be accomplished, with almost 10,000 species of birds in the world, but more limited local goals are within reach. Others tackle even more enormous tasks, collecting butterflies and other insects, which comprise 950,000 species (approximately 250,000 of which are butterflies and moths).
• Physical achievements: With new technologies available in the form wrist devices or cell phone apps, many are encouraged toward healthy habits by counting steps or kilometers of running, biking or running. While it does not count as a disinterested activity per sae, the counting is fun on its own, and quite motivating (similar to games). Others set their sites much higher, counting mountains ascents or oceans sailed. Other health oriented collections include number of days not smoking or drinking, or years as a vegetarian.
• Games: It is almost cheating to count games as aesthetic, because they embody meaningful engagement, even if some question the importance of that meaning. Games usually include some form of collecting and counting of items or points as part of their engagement strategy. Gamification is catching on as a way to enhance motivation in many activities not typically associated with gaming, such as learning and job performance, and a central part of games is collecting badges or points.
• Connoisseurship: The collection of artifacts that represent epitomes of human creative ability can take many forms. Oenophiles keep cellars of many wine vintages, and some collect things as expensive as cars, finely crafted swords, jewelry, or, of course, works of art. Rare books, maps, and historical mechanical instruments fill other connoisseur collections.
• Membership: Particularly in these days of computer-based social networking, but also going back to clubs like the Masonic Temple, connecting to societies and contributing to them can be seen as a form of collecting. How many friends do you have in Facebook? How many LinkedIn connections? How many follow you on Instagram? These connections help to define us, and always have. Collections themselves can be a communal activity.
• Records and awards: Another form of collection related to gamification is setting personal or competitive records. Numbers of “wins,” even if personal, contribute to the ongoing motivation to engage with life, symbolizing, if not exemplifying, success.

I am sure that others can expand on this list, indefinitely.

The Purpose of Art

What is the purpose of art? Why do people invest time and money to make and enjoy aesthetic objects and events?

For many people, engagement with the arts, whether in the form of the things we hang on our walls, the books we choose to read, the films and programmes we see in theaters and on our TVs, the music we listen to in so many different contexts, and the visits we make to museums or theatrical performances, accounts for significant amount of their time. The question of why we invest this time has been the stimulus for a lot of thought over the centuries, even though most people don't feel the need to ask it. For many, art is enjoyable--and perhaps there is nothing to gain in dissecting a good thing.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

But many do ask, and I think that this asking is a reflection of the best answer to the question. Let me back up and offer some of the many purposes proposed over the years for art.

First, there have been strong arguments that art in fact serves no purpose, or more specifically, that we derive no personal gain from aesthetic things—and that this is at least partly the source of their enjoyment. This is the “disinterest” theory of art, that we take pleasure from art precisely because it serves no practical purpose. Kant argued that disinterest (not in the sense of “not interested,” but in the sense of “providing no profit”) is essential for being able to see something as aesthetic--that as soon as a practical purpose becomes a driver, aesthetic value is squashed. However, most of us would agree that pleasure is not without value, and although the value of pleasure is not as direct as sustenance, it might be a sign of other gains.

In contrast, some have said that art is our way of making aspects of our world “special,” or distinct from everyday experience, in order to celebrate our humanity. Art allows us to give human meaning to things (Dissanayake, 1995). Baroque and Rococo visual art, for example, emphasized the pleasures and drama of being human. But stories and rituals offer more universal and fundamental examples. Whether captured as literature or related over dinner, stories put a frame around a certain experience and provide it a structure; they define relationships and uncover motives. Stories distill plots and themes from the ongoing flow of experience. In other words, stories make life special in a critical way--they help us make sense of our lives when everyday experience fails us (Burke, 1945; Bruner, 1985). The “making special” purpose is also clear when we consider the universal drive for social rituals, some of which are not only filled with decoration and elaborate works of art, but become art forms in themselves.

Others offer that the function of art is to to create a distraction for the miseries we encounter in everyday life (Connor, 1999). It can be argued that art disguises the true state of the world--its messiness, inconclusiveness, seeming randomness, or worse, malignancy. Some people use television and Internet entertainment excessively, preventing potentially more productive behaviors that require more effort and helping them forget their troubles. Some read adventure, intrigue and romance novels to make up for the lives they see as mundane otherwise.

This distraction argument is very similar to Plato’s assertion, in The Republic, that art is merely imitation, and a negative influence on one's ability to live a good life. In Plato’s case, and the case of those that have interpreted him, art does not disguise misery, but prevents the discovery of a more beautiful truth that can be discovered only through philosophy and other intellectual disciplines, leaving it concealed under a pleasant, easier, and therefore addictive veneer.

The concept of catharsis has some similarities to the “distraction” argument, but instead suggests “redirection,” in that art, especially in forms that evoke powerful emotion, can be therapeutic in helping us work out issues and anxieties that are otherwise difficult to address directly. Some argue that dreams function in the same way, so art might be seen as a form of dreaming in waking life. Catharsis is seen as both emotional purification (relieving harmful emotions) or as building emotional resilience (a sort of emotional practice). But in both cases it is suggesting that art is still a substitute, or imitation of life.

Art has a more direct positive impact if it is assumed to be instructive--showing us life as it is or ought to be (in direct contrast to Plato's concern about imitation). Realism is an approach to art that strives to depict the life we know, reassuring our communal perceptions and at the same time impressing us with the artist's skill in reproduction. But more than just being realistic, artistic realism also intends to help us see aspects of life that might otherwise be difficult to see. It might depict a social ugliness often ignored, or celebrate the everyday beauty of life we sometimes forget. In other words, art may function to point out what we should see and value, but too often miss.

But some suggest that art is much more significant, even capable of transcending everyday life. Romanticism saw artists as having a special connection to nature or spiritual dimensions, as being conduits to the truth that lies beneath the surface of everyday life (Emerson, 1844). From this stance, artists are especially sensitive to the symbols that nature offers instead of revealing its truths directly. They have the ability to understand and use these symbols, or metaphors, in ways most of us cannot. Some see artists as voices for god and nature, as offering expressions of the divine. Medieval artists also held this role, although the church itself was the conduit to the divine, and the artist merely the church’s servant.

Coming perhaps full circle, back to the belief that art is primarily without purpose, others have recently claimed that art has no inherent purpose or value, but that it is merely what a privileged social group calls “art” (Dickie, 1971). In other words, a particular art work, art form, or artist gains status through visibility (in the right places) or word-of-mouth (from the right sources). Awards, critical reviews, gallery openings, and even political support are in control, and can permit the emergence of widely disparate examples of modern and postmodern art, or, on the other hand, narrow perspectives. From this perspective, aesthetic value may not exist until it is institutionally designated, for whatever reason (even one of the above). Art is not the product of a personal judgment or experience, but a socially contrived one. So in this case the ultimate purpose of art is simply a way to show your sophistication, through group membership, to others.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Given the diverse purposes of art that have been proposed, all of which contain a grain of truth, some have questioned the value of any theory of art that attempts to define it (Weitz, 1956). What is more useful is to view art as an open concept, one that has multiple references and evolves as new uses of the concept emerge. I began this post not with the question, “What is art?,” but “What is the purpose of art?” The "What is art" question creates lots of conceptual problems, and can force us to prematurely assign a purpose and context in order to get the answer we want. The answer might be very different if you feel art should instruct, provide distraction, or have no purpose. It might be better to explore what broad category of things serve all the purposes we attribute to art.

In various situations, art can function in any the ways mentioned so far--to cleanse, heal, distract, celebrate, instruct (or obstruct), transcend, or simply impress, all of which suggest that everyday life somehow holds us back. As Picasso rather dramatically put it, the purpose of art is "washing the dust of daily life off our souls." But art has another critical function that fully embraces everyday experience as being without dust. This function is engagement--appreciation and participation in life, even everyday life, in ways that strengthen our involvement and help us to derive not just more pleasure, but more meaning. The meaningful engagement hypothesis helps to explain each of the other purposes, but casts them in a new light. Under this light, art is not trivial by any means, but neither is everyday life. And the conceptual problem of defining what art IS is made simpler. In fact, it is all around us.
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References
Dissanayake, E. (1995), Homo Aestheticus
Burke, K. (1945), A Grammar of Motives
Bruner, J. (1985), Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Connor, S. (1999), What If There Were No Such Thing As The Aesthetic?
Dickie, G. (1971), Aesthetics, An Introduction
Emerson, R.W. (1844), The Poet. Essays, Second Series
Weitz, M. (1956), The Role of Theory in Aesthetics. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15: 27–35

The source of aesthetic experiences

I have a childhood memory I like to recall from time to time, and it goes something like this:

I am walking along the sidewalk in the small back yard of my home in Ohio. I am looking up at the sky. It is late summer, and still quite warm. The sky is blue, but dotted with small cumulus clouds floating in the warmth and stillness, none of them threatening to turn into storms. Night is approaching, dinner is over, and I am enjoying the evening air as a closing ritual of the day before the indoor rituals of the night. I am alone.

I hear the periodic, ghostly "coo-a-ooo, ooo-ooo" of an unseen mourning dove, presumably roosting in a leafy tree or grasping one of the phone lines that string through the neighborhood. At the time, I do not think about the source of that sound, preferring to preserve its disembodied and inhuman quality to enhance the moment.

The small backyard is surrounded by a simple fence of widely spaced wire, designed to keep out only the stray dogs that might wander through the neighborhood. It would not to stop a person from entering, and would only tempt a clever cat, so its intention is mostly symbolic, to denote a private space. Flowers and bushes grow along the fence to enhance the sense of a border. And it works. I know it is my space inside this rough frame.

These sights, sounds and feelings create a feeling of comfort, but also awe and joy, which reminds me of a song we sing at school--"God Bless America." The song (clichéd as it may be) has a beautiful melody containing a risky range of notes, especially for a child of 5; and the song lyrics, with their reference to mountains and prairies and oceans, make me think of a place I belong to that is much bigger than this small yard. I begin to sing the song, almost involuntarily, quietly, barely voicing the words so that they are only for me to hear.

I also find myself spinning slowly, making the clouds rotate above me, and causing the cooing sounds to rotate as well, enhancing the tonal change of the dove’s song due to the subtle Doppler effect. It is a childish dance to the rhythm of the music in my head and in my voice, but the effect is sensually stunning. I am transformed for these brief moments.

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Such simple moments can hold lasting power—a power that creates feelings of connection to the world and meaning about our place in the world. Some moments are equally momentous due to their power to question our place and current sense of meaning. Both types of moments are aesthetic in the same way that a work of fine art can be aesthetic. Consider some of the qualities exhibited in the experience I described:

• It has immediate qualities, not simply reflections. It is physical, as well as emotional and thoughtful. It includes the affective qualities of the experience.
• It is a time of engagement with the natural and man-made elements around me—the sky, the clouds, the sound of the dove, the fence. I am submissive to these elements, but also actively engaged with them. I walk, I focus on the ones that add to the experience, and I spin to change them. I am not passive.
• I am captivated, compelled to develop the experience further. It is not momentary; it builds. I am compelled to see it build, and I contribute to its building through my actions.
• I anticipate a rewarding outcome, even if only a feeling. I believe the feeling will be a take-away that enhances. I chose my actions based on the anticipated results.
• I add a man-made element--the song, that for me at that moment matches the feeling evoked by the other elements.

The experience has a coherence and completeness. It is marked off in time as special and notable. You could say it had a beginning, middle, and end, even if I was not conscious of these. In fact, I have no idea how long the experience lasted. It might have been less than a minute or two, or it could have been 30 minutes. The time is somewhat irrelevant, although some period of time was required for development of the experience. It was more than a momentary sensation.

I propose these are all aesthetic qualities: immediacy, engagement, captivation or compellingness, anticipation, contribution, coherence, completeness (see Dewey, 1934), and that they are the qualities of an experience, not a thing. These qualities can be felt in simple everyday situations, but they are also the source of the ubiquitous desire we have for the fine arts—like music, literature, films, and painting. The fine arts are, in a way, just a way of refining or distilling these qualities of everyday experience for our enjoyment and edification. It would be wrong to say that the fine arts are a short cut or a simulation, because they create experiences of their own. They also aid us in creating our everyday aesthetic experiences by offering approaches for achieving them.

These qualities are easy to assign to a film or novel, and any narrative for that matter, although some might question the presence of the quality of contribution. However, many narrative theorists have noted that each viewer or reader brings their own experiences to the narrative, even if they do not contribute words or images, and that good authors leave space for this contribution. We each bring an interpretation to the work, and we imagine the spaces between the scenes. We imagine the faces described, the settings, and the emotions felt. We each bring these uniquely, which partially explains the diversity of reactions people have to the same narrative.

But what about a painting? Imagine the experience of seeing a painting by Mark Rothko for the first time:

                                                                               Photo by Monika Kostera

You walk into the gallery and are confronted by the work hanging across the room, imposing in its size and the boldness of its large fields of colors. Perhaps it is a bit shocking compared to the more figurative and less abstract work you are accustomed to seeing. You wonder what is the source of your reaction, either positive or negative, and you want to wander closer.

Standing nearer, you notice that an important contributor to its power is the small band of orange placed curiously along the bottom edge, barely fitting within the frame, beneath the deep field of black, and far below the hovering violet at the top. The simplicity of the composition is what is shocking, as well as the power this simplicity carries. If this is meant to suggest a landscape, it is one from an alien world, with phosphorescent skies and flaming lands at the shores of a black tar sea. But you suspect that no landscape is intended, and that this impression is just you imposing your normative judgments on the work. But that is part of the experience, that the work inspires you to impose some expectation of an everyday scene, and that some of the impact is your realization that the work desires to thwart your expectations.

As you move even closer, letting the painting fill your field of vision, you know for a fact that this is not a landscape, and that the paint has a presence of its own—it is not representative of anything other than paint. The edges between the colors are the kind of edges created by camelhair brushes being roughly pushed into the canvas, rather than by nature. The effect is one of conscious sloppiness, not natural order. The extremely narrow, but extremely loud orange base asserts a power that is magnified by the neutral blackness above it, and balanced by the cooler violet floating high above—in the “sky” of the painting. You know this paint was placed where it is for a reason by human hands. And you feel that the reason is not reason, and certainly not representation, but sensibility and emotion. As you step back once again and walk away, the experience of seeing the painting sticks with you. You might feel the work was excessively childish, not worthy of your engagement, or that it represents an infrequently felt spiritual aspect of perception. More likely, your feelings lie somewhere in between, but the experience has engaged the potential of these extremes nonetheless.

When you fully appreciate a work like the one described, it involves immediacy, engagement, captivation, compellingness, anticipation, coherence, and completeness. The frame outlines the world of the encounter, but it does not contain it. And the contribution is your perception at work.

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I haven’t offered this comparison of an everyday experience to a recognized work of fine art to suggest that they are equal. One does not substitute for the other, and one does not naturally precede or follow the other. They stand on their own. Most importantly, one is not greater than the other.

The fine arts and the arts of everyday life co-exist comfortably. But I suspect we do not do enough to recognize the aesthetic value of everyday experience. We often forget the power each of us can bring to bear in creating an aesthetic life. Some make this happen in much more complex ways than the simple childhood experience shared above. They may create it through experiences like climbing a mountain, traveling to a distant place, or perfecting skills in a martial art, or through more formal experiences like engaging in a sport or participating in a social event—such as a wedding, or within professional practice, or in the learning that leads us to that practice. But more frequently, aesthetic experiences arise in everyday contexts like preparing and eating meals and creating a home. Aesthetic experiences come in many shapes and in many contexts.