We present a theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. Any theory of art has to ideally have three components. The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; What is the brain circuitry involved? Our paper begins with a quest for artistic universals and proposes a list of ‘Eight laws of artistic experience’ -- a (...) set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain. One of these principles is a psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect: If a rat is rewarded for discriminating a rectangle from a square, it will respond even more vigorously to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier that the prototype. We suggest that this principle explains not only caricatures, but many other aspects of art. Example: An evocative sketch of a female nude may be one which selectively accentuates those feminine form-attributes that allow one to discriminate it from a male figure; a Boucher, a Van Gogh, or a Monet may be a caricature in ‘colour space’ rather than form space. Even abstract art may employ ‘supernormal’ stimuli to excite form areas in the brain more strongly than natural stimuli. Second, we suggest that grouping is a very basic principle. The different extrastriate visual areas may have evolved specifically to extract correlations in different domains , and discovering and linking multiple features into unitary clusters -- objects -- is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these areas to limbic structures. In general, when object-like entities are partially discerned at any stage in the visual hierarchy, messages are sent back to earlier stages to alert them to certain locations or features in order to look for additional evidence for the object . Finally, given constraints on allocation of attentional resources, art is most appealing if it produces heightened activity in a single dimension rather than redundant activation of multiple modules. This idea may help explain the effectiveness of outline drawings and sketches, the savant syndrome in autists, and the sudden emergence of artistic talent in fronto-temporal dementia. In addition to these three basic principles we propose five others, constituting a total of ‘eight laws of aesthetic experience’. (shrink)

I interpret Kant's distinction between free and dependent beauty in a way that makes it possible for an object to be judged dependently beautiful without being judged freely beautiful. This is an alternative to the analyses provided by Malcolm Budd and Christopher Janaway, which both face a dilemma because they entail that an object must be judged freely beautiful in order to be judged dependently beautiful. The dilemma is that either the determinant of a judgement of dependent beauty is based (...) upon non-aesthetic criteria (if the object is not freely beautiful), or else the judgement is superfluous for an account of aesthetic value. My analysis of the distinction allows both kinds of beauty to play a meaningful role in a theory of aesthetic value. (shrink)

To say that an object is beautiful or ugly is seemingly to refer to a property of the object. But it is also to express a positive or negative response to it, a set of aesthetic values, and to suggest that others ought to respond in the same way. Such judg- ments are descriptive, expressive, and normative or prescriptive at once. These multiple features are captured well by Humean accounts that analyze the judgments as ascribing relational properties. To say that (...) an object is beautiful is to say, in part, that it is such as to elicit a response expressing pleasure in certain observers. The observers in question must not be ignorant, biased, insensitive, or of poor taste, and they must not base their evaluations on aesthetically irrelevant properties of the objects they judge. The reference to the object's "being such . . ." captures the objective side of the relation; refer- ence to the pleasurable response captures the expressive function of these judgments; and the ideal properties of the observers suggest that others ought to judge in the same way. (shrink)

The point of this symposium is to locate one trajectory of the new wave of discussions about beauty beyond the customary confines of analytic aesthetics and to situate it at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, social-political philosophy, and cultural criticism. Three essays follow this introduction authored by Marica Muelder Eaton, Paul C. Taylor, and Susan Bordo. They represent a conjoined effort to move 'beauty' beyond the traditional parameters of past contextual theories of art. This introductory essay offers some guidance as (...) to why a symposium on beauty merits attention in 1999. (shrink)

I argue that clarity about essence provides the tools both to isolate a distinct concept of art and to see why anti-essentialism is a plausible, though incomplete, doctrine about it. While this concept is not the only concept currently expressed by our word ‘art’, it is an interesting, and might be an important, one. One of the challenges it poses to conceptual analysis is to explain what it is to be better than being good of a thing's kind, where this (...) extra-goodness is neither a trivial fact nor simply a matter of being a good instance of two different kinds of thing. While anti-essentialism seems to be right about what types of analysis will not work for it, this result only deepens the question of what its proper analysis is. (shrink)