Art that moves

exploring the embodied basis of art representation, production, and evaluation

Kendall J. Eskine

Aaron Kozbelt

pp. 157-173

in: Aesthetics and the embodied mind, Berlin, Springer, 2015

Abstract

Aesthetics plays a central role in human life. Given its ubiquity across cultures, there is no shortage of theories about its origin, function, underlying mechanisms, purpose, and so on. While we applaud the diversity of these approaches and their commitment to shedding light on this mysterious and abstract conceptual domain, many of them are unabashedly top-down, centering on the role of higher-order, reason-based assumptions about how the mind works. In contrast to this view, over the past decade, findings across the cognitive sciences have provided considerable support for the thesis that cognition is fundamentally grounded in sensorimotor and perceptual states. The now popular view of embodied cognition – a species of grounded cognition – has energized many of the creative insights that have helped breathe life into traditionally intractable cognitive problems (e.g., symbol grounding). However, insightful critics like Mahon and Caramazza (J Physiol 102:59–70, 2008) and Dove (Cognition 110:412–431, 2009) have argued that grounded accounts of cognition fail to adequately explain the representation and processing of abstract concepts like AESTHETICS, which give no unified perceptual experiences. In this chapter, we argue that aesthetics (like other abstract conceptual representations) can be accommodated by an embodied theory that uses two classes of perceptual information (sensorimotor and affective) to explain art representation, production, and evaluation.