John Ruskin thought that drawing should be taught at the same level as language in every child's education, whether they have any artistic talent or not. Ruskin claimed that looking at the world with the intention of rendering what we see changes our experience entirely, which I have confirmed for myself recently. Although I have no artistic talent and do not intend to learn, I find that I am able to switch over to an aesthetic awareness of my own visual field at will and without effort. Since I don't actually intend to render what I see, this effect lasts only about 60 seconds for me. I am quite certain that if I intended to sketch what I saw, I could maintain this posture indefinitely.
Follow this link to the chapter that introduced me to Ruskin and his approach in Alain de Botton's Art of Travel.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Dear aesthetics students and fans,
Starting this semester we will focus on the five-senses as a foundational delivery system for aesthetic experiences. Building on the five senses (or six if we count reflective thought as a sense) we have extended the outreach of our sense faculties into over a dozen Cultural and Metaesthetic categories which we call the HFAP (Havlicek Ferguson Aesthetic Profile). Please take the time to study the profile and then page on into our on-going discussion from past years and in particular look at the 10 stage, 2000 year historical overview of Aesthetic thought beginning with Plato and Aristotle and continuing hopefully with the advent of the HFAP and what Dr. Joe Ferguson and I consider a psychologically valid culturally-based look at the eye and mind and what counts as valuable artistic and creative ways of experiencing and expressing impressions about art. Dr. William Havlicek
Havlicek-Ferguson Aesthetic Profile
The
extent to which an artwork, or any aesthetic object, can be objectively
characterized is sensitive and controversial. It is commonly felt that
deconstruction detracts 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. For the last several years, Bill
Havlicek and I have been engaged in a philosophical discussion around this question with a purported artificial
intelligence calling itself Constructive Reductor. 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.
Craft skill (Escher)
|
Expressive depth
(Dufrenne)
|
Neurobiological
stimulus (Ramachandran)
|
Psychobiological
stimulus (Freud)
|
Archetypal stimulus
(Jung)
|
Intellectual appeal
(Close)
|
Ideological appeal
(Rivera)
|
Expression of an
alternative world (Dali)
|
Novelty (Breton)
|
Creativity (Pollock)
|
Complexity
(Mandelbrot)
|
Social alliance
(Warhol)
|
Economic value (Van
Gogh)
|
Comfort or threat (Max
or Bosch)
|
Nostalgic association
(Rockwell)
|
Consensual/Controversial
(Rockwell/Ernst)
|
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