For this session of the course we considered George Dickie's claim that the aesthetic attitude is a myth (Reading 40 in the set book). Edward Bullough, writing in 1912, famously described the notion of distancing via a purple passage about being in a ship in a fog at sea. The fog is potentially terrifying. But it is possible to achieve a disinterested appreciation of the fog (see Bullough, Reading 23 '''Psychical Distance" as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle'). Bullough wrote about 'the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent mil, blurring the outline of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness' etc. But the notion of disinterested appreciation as being central to aesthetic experience has a long history, finding its most influential defender in the work of Immanuel Kant's discussion of disinterested pleasure as being at the heart of aesthetic contemplation.
Dickie is scathing about the idea that there is a special psychological state characteristic of aesthetic appreciation. Dickie argues that there is no special state that we need to achieve to appreciate art. Most of what goes under the name of an aesthetic attitude is simply paying attention to what is in front of us.
In the gallery we attempted to test this experientally in relation to works by Agnes Martin and by Gerhard Richter on Level 3 East of Tate Modern. Achieving a meditative state in which we are receptive to what is in front of us is not quite the same as paying close attention to what is in front of us. In the meditative and pleasurable disinterested state, formal qualities are foregrounded, and the effects of colour felt more intensely. The only problem is, that if such a state is to be central to our experience of art it is difficult to see how we are to discriminate between its objects: for some of us the wall or the floor were potentially just as interesting as the paintings - true disinterestedness would involve a distance from questions about value and richness.
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