Art as Cognition: How Gist Reframes the Aesthetic Experience as Conversation

This book offers a different take on the aesthetic experience. Firstly, aesthetics has traditionally been analyzed only from the point of view of the viewer. This book does not do that, as aesthetics involves both a viewer and a maker; thus, a satisfactory account of the aesthetic experience would be one that was derived from both kinds of perceptual experiences. Secondly, this book focuses on the role of low-level features, such as texture, illumination, color, shape, movement, etc., in the aesthetic experience. Perception itself significantly involves these low-level features, and the sensory experience of aesthetics does so particularly. To explicate this, the book provides background information into recent findings in visual science that support this emphasis on low-level features, particularly within the framework of very early perception known as gist perception, which is experienced in the first approximately 300 ms. This gist experience is also viewed through the philosophical lens of sensing, which gives a framework with which to understand low-level percepts. Thirdly, the book concludes with a description of how the perceptual and cognitive processes of viewer and maker interact with curatorial/critical testimony in order to construct the artwork’s meaning. Thus, art is seen as a kind of conversation.

Dena Shottenkirk writes in the field of epistemology and aesthetics, emphasizing the intersection of the two. The author of the monograph titled Nominalism and Its Aftermath: The Philosophy of Nelson Goodman (Springer) which tracks the relationship between his metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics, she is also the author of a book on censorship in art titled Cover Up the Dirty Parts (Cambridge Scholars Press). She has also co-edited two volumes, the most recent one titled Perception, Cognition, and Aesthetics (Routledge). An Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, she is also a practicing artist and formerly an art critic for such publications as Artforum; in addition, she is the founder of the public philosophy non-profit talkPOPc (Philosophers’ Ontological Party club), which currently sponsors public conversations between participants and philosophers.