The Aesthetic Attitude

Kemp, Gary

doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/39.4.392

Cited by 21 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Second, the predominance of exploration afforded by atonal music opens up the opportunity to study effects that stem from an aesthetic attitude—a state of mind that, according to philosophical aesthetics, “is entered into, voluntarily and consciously, by an individual, making that individual receptive to having an aesthetic experience” ( Fenner, 1998 , p. 1954) and thereby involves a certain intentional stance of the listener ( Fenner, 1996 , 1998 ; Kemp, 1999 ; Levinson, 2009 ; Brattico and Pearce, 2013 ; Hodges, 2016 ). Some scholars conceptualize this stance as an attentional focus on the formal and perceptual properties of an object in the context of an aesthetic experience ( Levinson, 2009 ; Juslin and Isaksson, 2014 ).…”

Section: Future Research Avenuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

et al. 2022

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Atonal music is often characterized by low predictability stemming from the absence of tonal or metrical hierarchies. In contrast, Western tonal music exhibits intrinsic predictability due to its hierarchical structure and therefore, offers a directly accessible predictive model to the listener. In consequence, a specific challenge of atonal music is that listeners must generate a variety of new predictive models. Listeners must not only refrain from applying available tonal models to the heard music, but they must also search for statistical regularities and build new rules that may be related to musical properties other than pitch, such as timbre or dynamics. In this article, we propose that the generation of such new predictive models and the aesthetic experience of atonal music are characterized by internal states related to exploration. This is a behavior well characterized in behavioral neuroscience as fulfilling an innate drive to reduce uncertainty but which has received little attention in empirical music research. We support our proposal with emerging evidence that the hedonic value is associated with the recognition of patterns in low-predictability sound sequences and that atonal music elicits distinct behavioral responses in listeners. We end by outlining new research avenues that might both deepen our understanding of the aesthetic experience of atonal music in particular, and reveal core qualities of the aesthetic experience in general.

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Section: Future Research Avenuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

et al. 2022

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“…It has, however, been criticised both explicitly (the most famous critique is Dickie 1964; although cf. Kemp 1999, for an argument that Dickie's analysis is not historicallysensitive enough to depict the views of disinterestedness theorists' views quite accurately) and implicitly (the very idea that aesthetics could be defined quite so easily is questioned by Walton 2007). 8 To some extent, Stolnitz himself implies this when he notes that Shafsbury, the earliest of the thinkers in whose works the aesthetic disinterestedness appears, was interested in Plato/Plotinus and made the claim about to kalon (Stolnitz 1961:133).…”

Section: Aesthetic Disinterestednessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epicurus and aesthetic disinterestedness

Celkyte

2017

Mare Nostrum (São Paulo)

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O desinteresse estético é um dos conceitos centrais da estética, e Jerome Stolnitz, o mais proeminente teórico do desinteresse no século XX, afirmou que (i) o envolvimento dos pensadores antigos com esta noção era superficial e pouco desenvolvido e, consequentemente, (ii) a emergência do desinteresse no século XVIII marca o nascimento da estética como disciplina. Neste artigo, pretendo usar os trabalhos existentes de Epicuro para mostrar que o filósofo antigo não apenas tinha conceitos similares, como também os usava de maneiras cuidadosas e complexas. Eu argumento que, no enquadramento teórico de Epicuro, as artes pertenciam a categoria dos desejos "meramente naturais", e esta classificação, combinada com aquilo que sabemos da rejeição de Epicuro da crítica da arte, mostra que ele tinha desenvolvido cuidadosamente razões que fundamentavam a ideia de que a arte deveria ser abordada terminalmente, ao invés de instrumentalmente. Por fim, eu comparo a noção de desinteresse estético com as visões de Epicuro acerca da arte e argumento que de muitas maneiras a última não é inferior a primeira, e que, portanto, deve pertencer a história da estética.

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“…A slower, voluntary pathway, recruiting frontal lobe structures, mediates instead conscious pleasure or enjoyment. Also, in philosophical aesthetics, scholars postulate the pivotal role of contemplation, intentionality, and cognition in explaining aesthetic pleasure (Bundgaard 2015;Fenner 1996;Kemp 1999). In our previous work, we put forward a spatiotemporal road map of aesthetic processes related to music in particular, discerning between involuntary, low-level perceptualemotional stages and reflective processes involving cognitive control and leading to the three main outcomes of an aesthetic experience: aesthetic emotion, preference or conscious liking, and aesthetic judgment (Brattico 2015;Brattico & Jacobsen, 2009;Brattico et al 2009Brattico et al -2010Brattico et al 2013;Nieminen et al 2011;Reybrouck & Brattico 2015).…”

Section: A Social Dimension To Enjoyment Of Negative Emotion In Art Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

Art as emotional exploration

Oatley

2017

Behav Brain Sci

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The Roman poet Horace said poetry gives pleasure and instructs. A more informative theory is that poetry and art, in general, are less about pleasure than about exploration of emotions. Literary authors concentrate on negative emotions, seemingly to try and understand them. In two studies, reading literary art enabled the transformation of selfhood, not by being instructed but by people changing in their own ways.

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The Aesthetic Attitude

Cited by 21 publications

References 0 publications

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

Epicurus and aesthetic disinterestedness

Art as emotional exploration

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