Scanning the Blog

Dear aesthetically minded viewers:

I want to welcome you to this blogsite and encourage you to spool down through the many Postings and Comments. Hopefully, you will discover that the many topics on this blog are interesting and timely. I encourage you to add comments to any of the numerous Postings; especially those that were made a year or more ago. Simply title your comments with the title-- 'New Comments' and the current date will automatically be attached to it.

My students from past classes in Aesthetics are encouraged to stay in touch with us so they may respond to your response. I too of course constantly visit the site and manage it as best I can but the interesting thing about the site is that it has its own strange life in spite of my managing of it.

Read, spool, comment---keep the site alive with your fresh, creative input.

Bill Havlicek PhD

Many thanks from David Glen

Many thanks for allowing me to talk to you all tonight...I thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and hope I was able to impart something of value.

Please feel free to e-mail me at any time. My local address is davidglen@cox.net

Wishing you all great passion in everything you do!

David Glen

FACING THE FACTS

FACING THE FACTS

Dear students,

Please look at the video segments on the human face that appear
on the last posting. The aesthetic students from the Autumn semester
really enjoyed these segments and left some fascinating comments. I now invite you to read the student comments and to view the film segments. This is an opportunity for us to reflect on the complex ways in which we signal one another through the signs we call facial expressions. Following your reading and viewing please comment on what you think is aesthetically important about all of this.

The point of this exercise is for us to become more aware
of the most common forms of communication; this awareness is the start of
aesthetic awareness. In fact, becoming more aware of how we communicate
though the arts stems from our system of bodily signaling---
and the face is without doubt the most profound of these signaling systems.

Lets begin by thinking about the aesthetic realm of the face and proceed from there. I look forward to the your comments-- please record your thoughts for us to consider.

Regards,

Bill Havlicek

THE HUMAN FACE

This post is devoted to the subject of the aesthetics of the human face. Human beings are naturally engaged with human faces, deriving endless information from reading the thousands of expressions found in faces. Any serious study of aesthetic experience must begin with the face for it is the first thing we recognize and respond to as infants. After we learn to recognize our mother's face we quickly learn to respond to other significant faces as we mature.

As we mature, so does the content that we read into faces-- in fact a measure of our humanity can be determined by the degree to which we can respond to the signals broadcast by the face. For the lover, misreading the signals can be cause for concern. For the artist it can be the cause for elation at the successful portrayal of a significant other.

The film segments on this site are some of the most effective and enjoyable reflections on the mysterious and fascinating subject of the human face. Please enjoy learning more about something that we tend to take for granted-- which in the end is the most fascinating thing in all of human experience.

Bill Havlicek PhD

UT PICTURA POESIS

This blogsite is devoted to the study of aesthetic experience. The study of aesthetic experience entails reflecting on the many ways in which the five senses (mediated by thinking) provides life-enhancing enrichment. This appreciative stance is in keeping with a long tradition in the history of art known as UT PICTORA POESIS. This is a tradition of thinking about aesthetically significant art as part of the fabric of cultural edification in which universal values of: beauty, balance, moral and ethically important stories and ideas are embodied in the media of art. Here painting shares characteristics with poetry, dramatic art with the novel, narrative arts and music with dance, opera or film where separate art forms are cross-pollinated and conjoined.

The idea of UT PICTORA POESIS points to a unification theory of the arts and further to the underlying reality of how all human faculties combine in any aesthetic experience or everyday perception for that matter. In this way, UT PICTORA POESIS can be understood as a form of kinesthetic consciousness united to the highest forms of thought. As the philosopher Descartes said, this is a commonsense approach to appreciating how the five senses work in common under the aegis of the mind. When the common unity of the senses are placed under moral and ethical value systems one has achieved what the principle of UT PICTORA POESIS promoted, which was to make humankind-- kinder, more reflective, creative, practical and more aware and ultimately transformed. It is my hope that this blogsite can contribute to this tradition. In this spirit I want to encourage all bloggers to comment on the many topics already posted on this site. I will endeavor, with the support of my colleague Dr. Joe Ferguson and his commonsense approach to the psychology of perception-- to offer fresh and worthwhile updates on points of view on aesthetic themes on this site.

To this end, Joe and I have been working on a taxonomy of aesthetic expression in which well-known visual artists are analyzed using a range of sense and thought processes. Joe has used his background as a clinical psychologist to organize these perceptual forms under a numerical rating system. The numerical rating is in no way to be confused with an IQ test or indication of some superior status based on higher numbers on what we call the HFAP. The idea for a rating system is to simply make one more aware of the different thought and sense processes we have noted in diverse artists, and also to draw out the identifiable elements of any particular aesthetic experience. The HFAP is intended to serve an aesthetic purpose by promoting ways to appreciate what artists have made and the underlying levels of human awareness that were experienced by the artists in the making of their artworks. This approach is consistent with John Dewey's pragmatic and important study- "Art as Experience." Click here to download HFAP forms and to see a brief description of its rating scales.

In the most general sense, this blogsite, the HFAP, posting and comments are about appreciating appreciation as an aesthetic end in itself as part of an on-going contribution to the history of UT PICTORA POESIS.

Bill Havlicek, PhD

Havlicek-Ferguson Aesthetic Profile

The extent to which an artwork or any aesthetic object can be objectively characterized is both sensitive and controversial. It is commonly felt that deconstruction detracts something from aesthetic experience, although I do not believe that this is true. In fact, reductive analysis necessarily broadens the scope of any aesthetic experience and subtracts nothing from it.

Bill Havlicek and I have been engaged in a philosophical discussion around this question with a purported artificial intelligence calling itself Constructive Reductor. We have agreed that it is time to add a practical framework to our inquiry, and to open this project to all interested parties. For this purpose Bill and I have cooked up a simple instrument that we call the Havlicek-Ferguson Aesthetic Profile (HFAP), which allows a rater to characterize her aesthetic experience in terms of the elements listed below, each on a scale of 1 to 10. For each element I have suggested an artist or thinker who might score high on it. The substitution of thinkers for artists, and the selection of these examples generally, reflect my limited sophistication in art appreciation and criticism.

Click here for downloadable HPFA forms and a brief description of each scale.

Craft skill
Expressive depth
Neurobiological stimulus
Psychophysical stimulus
Archetypal stimulus
Intellectual appeal
Ideological appeal
Expression of an alternative world
Novelty
Creativity
Complexity
Social alliance
Economic value
Comfort or threat
Nostalgic association
Cultural Significance
Controversy

Of course, this list of aesthetic elements is by no means complete, nor could any claim of completeness ever be confirmed for any such list. Our principle project here will be to establish a library of aesthetic profiles for a wide variety of artworks and other aesthetic objects. Once we accumulate a sufficient number of profiles Bill and I will be able to analyze them along various lines in order to determine, once and for all, the true nature of art (wink).

My own principle interest is in the functional psychological analysis of each aesthetic factor in the HFAP, so I must await a substantial body of data before I can expect meaningful results. For students and scholars of art and aesthetics such as you, however, the analytic reflection that the HFAP requires for each aesthetic object should be fruitful in and of itself.

Please download either oneof the HFAP printed forms or the corresponding Excel spreadsheet version by clicking here. Please send copies of your completed forms, as email attachments, to AestheticProfile@gmail.com and also post them as comments on this thread (see the “comments” link, immediately below). Copies of email sent to AestheticProfile@gmail.com will be automatically forwarded to Bill, to me, and to the Constructive Reductor. Excel spreadsheets via email are preferable since they can be more easily accumulated and analyzed by electronic means.

Suggestions for additional profile elements are welcome and better examples than mine of artworks that epitomize each of the profile elements are particularly welcome. Finally, please note that there are three blank lines at the bottom of each HFAP where you can add aesthetic criteria that you find particularly important for each artwork that you profile, which will help Bill and I to refind the scale over time.

I look forward to your results and to seeing where this exercise leads!

Joe Ferguson :)