Theories of Art, and Art as Theory of the World
In this chapter, we contrast the relationship between our theory of how art as exemplarizing conscious experience to create novel form and content with some traditional theories in aesthetics, most notably expressionism and formalism. Much traditional aesthetic theory, focused on the question of how artworks are to be distinguished from objects in the attempt to offer a definition or at least a characterization of what art is. This is a mistake. Art is that part of experience that changes the content of our world, of ourselves, and of art itself. Art is a dynamic of the reality of change. An artwork just in case it is created or chosen with the result that it elicits exemplar representation from aesthetic attention of the receiver with new form and content, including feeling and emotion, that reconfigures experience all aspects of life in a way that has intrinsic value.
Keywords: expressionism, formalism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, Barthes, Derrida, Danto, Croce, Collingwood, Rauschenberg, Reid
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