Workshop – Aesthetic Practices

People’s engagement with art is highly conventionalised and habitual. Within specific cultures and time periods we can look for aesthetic practices in order to understand better the expectations people have of art, and the values they associate with it. We can take such practices to codify dominant assumptions about what art is and about how we ought to treat it. In particular, a careful analysis of aesthetic practices can help us answer the question: What are the assumptions about the role of perception and cognition in our engagement with art that underpin the way people actually engage with art?

This workshop will promote a better understanding of aesthetic practices in general, and aims to encourage discussion of the following three practices in particular:

• Justifying artistic interpretations and evaluations
• Trying to ‘attune’ other people to appreciate specific works, styles, or genres
• Having one’s enthusiasm influence other people’s aesthetic lives

Although the first of these has been studied and discussed extensively in the literature on art criticism, the second and third have received relatively little attention. Moreover, these three practices are not always clearly distinguished conceptually. Also their interrelations remain largely unexplored. The workshop will aim to make some progress on this front.