Structure and Meaning of Aesthetic Experience: Attention, Absorption, and Critical Distancing.

The seminar will tackle the following cluster of questions: Is there a specific structure of aesthetic experience? Does it differ from everyday experience, and, if it does, in what ways? What is it its specific meaning for our experience in general? Is it linked in a specific way to artworks or art practices? We will discuss the answers to these questions by considering the role played by attention, absorption, and critical distancing. Attention is a notion that can be found in many canonical philosophers and psychologists, but in the last decades it has been deeply investigated under different points of view (not only by cognitive psychology, but also in specific relation to aesthetics, sociology, and the new technological reality). Absorption is a notion introduced in the contemporary aesthetic debate specifically by Michael Fried, but we will consider it both in relation to attention, and in relation to the “immersive” contemporary (artistic) practices. Immersion and absorption seem to be the opposite of critical distancing. Is this the case? Or is it possible to conceive of their relationship in different terms?
Please consider that this is not a frontal lectures course but a seminar, and as such it requires students’ active participation in class.

I will make available to the students a reader with texts centered on the topics of the course. I still have to decide what texts to include specifically among the required readings, but by this time I am considering, among others, extracts from the following:

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment, and possibly other texts;
2. William James, Principles of Psychology;
3. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before;
4. Bruce Nauman, Please Pay Attention Please;
5. Emilio Garroni, Image, Language, Figure;
6. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perceptions. Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture;
7. Eviata Zerubavel, Hidden in Plain Sight;
8. Winifred Gallagher, Rapt. Attention and the Focused Life;
9. Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception;
10. A.O. Scott, Better Living through Criticism.

I will post a more definite list as soon as possible. I will also propose some artworks or other experiences that I deem exemplary under the point of view of attention, absorption-immersion, and critical distancing.