What Monet meant: Intention and attention in understanding art
What Monet meant: Intention and attention in understanding art
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DOI:
10.1111/j.1540-594x.2004.00150.x
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发表时间:
2004-03-01
影响因子:
0.8
通讯作者:
Rollins, M
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Rollins, M
I am pursuing the impossible. I want to paint the made in connection with this research about air. how the response to art objects reveals funda-Claude Monet mental perceptual abilities. The reason is that art is designed to exploit, that is, to emphasize and encourage the use of, our perceptual abil-INTRODUCTION ities, sometimes in tandem, sometimes working alone. Thus" various works of art reflect differ-It has for many years been a working assump-ent properties of our visual system," Margaret tion in psychology that we can learn a great deal Livingstone tells us, providing a kind of cru-about perception by studying the viewer's cible in which those properties might be response to works of visual art. A general distilled.'Semir Zeki cites Constable's claim perceptual theory should be able to explain the that" painting is a science and should be perceiver's response to various types of visual pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature"; stimuli. Thus it should tell us how we are able and for Zeki, the relevant generalizations are the to recognize the poppies in Monet's paintings" laws of the brain." 2 Artists are experimental-and understand perceptually a great deal of ists, he argues, in whose works diverse percepwhat Vermeer's A Lady at the Virginals with a tual functions are dissociated; thus artworks are Gentleman is about. However, beyond the com-like brain images in which various functions mitment to what has been called experimental have been localized. If the belief that science aesthetics, there is often a further assumption: can shed light on art is what underwrites experi-that our responses to visual artworks can be mental aesthetics, then aesthetic experimentalespecially revealing of the fundamental principles ism is the belief that art can shed light on of perception or cognition, in terms of which matters of science. Indeed, on this view, art is a the responses are supposed to be explained. science; a science of the senses with which Paintings and drawings are not just one class of psychology and neurology might work hand-in-stimuli that must be accounted for. They are hand. particularly important cases that may tell us In what follows, I want to consider some more about our perceptual abilities than ordi-recent work in which the assumptions of experi-nary objects usually can. mental aesthetics and aesthetic experimentalism This assumption has lately become apparent have been combined. I shall argue that, although in accounts of art in terms of the operations of the importance of art perception for cognitive the brain. There are studies of picture recog-science is, in these cases, not entirely clear, nition in cognitive neuroscience, where the some useful implications have begun to emerge. pictures in question are works of art, and in And while the philosophical significance of such studies, the explanandum is the aesthetic scientific discoveries has sometimes been exagresponse. Moreover, several claims have been gerated, this work shows that cognitive science