On Wed, 15 Dec 1999, George Bailey wrote:
>
> So on the face of it, this sort of research might bear on aesthetics. I
> thought it was mentioned to provide an example of something that might
> indirectly apply to aesthetics, as proof that what brain studies might
> have to do with aesthetics.
It was, but I felt you were trying to stretch it further than I intended,
particularly when you characterized the experiment as flawed because it
didn't parse out the "aesthetics" the subject employed to make the choice.
> >Again, I brought up the experiment not as an explanation for aesthetic
> >judgements (good god, no!), but as a point of human unconscious reactions
> >which might underly a person's unexamined preferences, or inform an
> >examination thereof.
>
> But won't our unexamined preferences have a lot to do with our aesthetic
> judgments on some aesthetic theories?
The first part of your statment, that unexamined preferences have a lot to
do with what we'll call aesthetic judgments was exactly and only my
point. The second idea you raise, about the influence on unconscious cues
on those who engage in more rarified theorizing, is also of interest.
Bertrand Russel says of Kant: "He was like many people: in intellectual
matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in
the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee." I can only imagine
that a person's aesthetic taste can often lie in similar
previous experience, and that such experience can influence even an
academic.
I think the key difference between common taste and an individual sense
of aesthetics probably lies in that question of examination. Some people
might happily carry on in the spirit of their mother's predeliction for
sad-eyed children on black velvet, and some reject, examine, and move on.
Still, even those who have rejected the obvious sentimentality of my
example may maintain a preference (or its negative, which is as important
an influence) for some form of sentimentality in art or music.
I'm interested in the examined vs. the unexamined preference, because in
pop music (and advertising) it is the latter which is being targetted. A
song has to grab the audience's attention before they'll really listen to
it -- thus the jargon "hook" in the pop music world. And the same song
can be a hit for one artist and not for another, often based on
differences in arrangement and production. Springsteen wrote "Blinded by
the Light" but Manfred Mann made it a hit with a very different
presentation. Retorical question: Why?
Peg.
Department of Neuroscience
Tufts Medical School
Boston, MA
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/18/bonedance.html
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