Essay On Aesthetic Experience

Noel Carroll analyses in his paper ‘Aesthetic Experience Revisited’ three different views about ways to attain an aesthetic experience. The first account is the affect-orientated approach which purports to distinguish a certain emotive quality in the experience caused by an artwork. The second account is the axiological approach whose capacity commits to the necessary condition for an experience to be valued on its own. Finally, the content-oriented view addresses the properties that are produced by an artwork calling attention to all the main features (eg. expressive and formal properties) towards which the experience is directed. The paper will support the content-oriented view as the best account for attaining a distinctively aesthetic attitude.
The affect-oriented sense we attribute to an aesthetic experience arises when we consider a distinctive quality whose purpose is to focus on some of the features that affect our emotions. On this interpretation, the immediate response of an aesthetic work can be intended to deliver joy and pleasure to the viewer. “A vaguely more explicit candidate is pleasure or delight or enjoyment. One way of crafting this sort of view might be to say that something is an aesthetic experience only if it is pleasurable” (2002: 148). This approach excludes the possibility that we might attain an experience also through a tedious, not pleasurable effect. Some artworks that are characterized by boredom can still cause a gratified sense of pleasure to the audience. For instance, the meaning of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ evokes the shocking memories of the atrocities committed to the civilians during the Spanish Civil War. To understand the real sense Picasso intended to attribute to this painting, it involves t...

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...atures also allows for the spectator to grasp the intention for which the work was done.
In conclusion, this paper raised claims against the affective-oriented approach and the axiological-oriented approach as satisfactory accounts to give rise to a certain aesthetic experience. Not all artworks are subject to distinctive qualities like pleasure or enjoyment but they also consider all the elements part of the content that grabs our attention. If there is an aesthetic experience that we can gather from an artefact, this is the content-oriented view. This view is the capacity of the spectator to be in the condition to grasp the content of the work, given in terms of the properties it possesses, not in virtue of the capacity to elicit a feeling. Most importantly, it is the interpersonal relation between the understanding of the main features depicted in a composition.