ART APPRECIATION

PREPARED BY: KENNETH BINSON M. ENRIQUEZ

 Sensing the arts in the everyday is being able to perceive the elements of arts and
connecting or relating them to our personal and communal experiences. Relating the
elements to our experiences is a form of art appreciation and reflexivity.
ART APPRECIATION

 Is an encounter between the artwork and the audience (viewer, listener, etc. ). We the
audience seek meanings of artwork from our experience and life world relating to what
the artwork tries to convey. Such an encounter can only happen in various sensory
experiences, of seeing, listening, smelling, touching, and feeling. These sensory
experiences are ways and media by which we make sense of the artwork in question. By
processing the sensory experiences and telling us that we always see more, the artwork
becomes more visible or meaningful, and that we are transformed in the process.
REFLEXIVITY

 Then is awareness of our own selves and of our encounter with the artwork. The work of
art becomes like a mirror that provides a reflection of who we are which further enables
us to appreciate art. This awareness and sustained participation with art are where
creativity ensues as we recreate the artwork by finding other meanings, making sense of
it, and doing something out of that encounter and experience, such as composing an essay,
writing a journal or blog entry, and creating another artwork, among others. Our creativity
leads to a life well-lived, a life that continues to unfold and surprise us. This is exactly
how the philosopher Martin Heidegger conceptualized our existential condition as
Dasein, which means “being there,” one that continually unfolds, folds, reveals, and
conceals at the same time. It is our experience of knowing, discovery, reflexivity, and
ultimately creativity.
SENSORIAL EXPERIENCES

 Are complex in a way that hearing sometimes gives way to smelling or seeing becomes a
haptic experience. They are dynamic that these sensorial experiences both emanate from
and produce the forms of articulation and expression in art, popular culture, and the
everyday life (Stewart, 2005). The senses are productive, producing direct affective
knowledge in the body but also discursively productive of ways of conceptualizing. In a
sense, this is where arts bring forth truths about ourselves, our place, and our radical
alterity. Just as Barbara Bolt (2011) tells us that Van Gogh’s painting of a shoe reveals
truths not through mimetic likeness but through a bringing forth of the reality of peasant’s
shoe, arts have this capacity of disclosing and revealing the multifaceted existence in their
full but concealed strangeness. We see, hear, or feel an artwork, and the sense perceptions,
both literal and metaphorical, contribute to the rich and complex knowledge of and about
art in general.
SEEING

 The sense of sight is used to explain visual aspects of an artistic and everyday experience,
though it is not limited to the traditional mode of imagining/imaging life, reality, or forms
of representation. Seeing works with active perception (action, performance), self-
reflexivity, philosophy (hope, color), and aura. These forms of visuality penetrate deeper
beyond the conventional modes of interpreting a picture, a two-dimensional work of art, a
film, or a piece of writing as the act of seeing relates with other modes of thinking and
experiencing the real, fictional, material, and the abstract sensations produced by art.
LISTENING

 Is an act of bridging the internal and external dynamics of sensation and experience, as
with the other senses discussed. However, the act of active listening incorporates
additional corporeal and critical methods that should be considered. These include
listening in detail or listening between gap and silences, recorded and unrecorded history
of a singer, song, musical composition, or marginalized people. Listening is also about
evaluating the disciplining conditions, genre, or even forms of censorship that produced a
culture and history of listening, the same way that music, sound, medium, noise, and their
sources condition our past, present, and future modes of hearing and interpretation.
SMELLING

 Goes beyond the elementary appreciation of the delicate waft of an expensive perfume or
memorable gastronomic arousal upon sniffing a very expensive meal at a fine dining
restaurant. Smell is also about a qualitative experience rooted in the cultural interpretation
of what is acceptable or not. It is based on how social structures, such as class, race,
ethnicity, nation, and states condition our positive or negative interpretation of smelling
(again, this is not just limited to olfaction, but other senses could be used in this critical
study of sensing) such as what is a proper smell of a sanitized community dictated by the
state or the American colonial and imperial regime, which introduced the concept of
sanitation, hygiene, and health systems in the Philippines. Smell and smelling are possible
entry points into examining complex lives of migrants, high-society and pop culture,
economic and agricultural systems, or nation and state formation.
TASTE

 Just like smell, is similarly constructed in the way people, culture, and power discriminate
proper and acceptable degree of being liked, or a standard that fits a social, cultural, or
historical milieu. In tasting, food and foodways are examined as an interesting context
that may also require other critical forms of sensing and appreciation. Taste involves
ingestion of food as much as it involves the selection of what is delightfully pleasurable in
terms of culture, history, power, and notion of pleasure. Taste, as well as other forms of
sensing, is about the bodily performances of sensing, in other words, the embodiment of
sensation and discernment of the symbolic and real world through food, kitchen,
recording of an ephemeral act or scene (also known as ethnography), memory, and
people’s interaction.
TOUCH

 Makes us think about the intimacy or spaces that an artistic or cultural experience
instigates to an individual or group. Touch explores the notion of the body and sensation
both as a singular and total experience of “being” in a world, location, or as a person
realizes how he or she is performing with his or her senses, words, consciousness,
emotions, and reactions. Touch is an interplay between loob and labas, the internal
against the external forces that make up human anatomy, physiology, and agency.
Touching is both sensing and a form of feeling, as in ‘touched’ by the music, film, play, or
scene. Touch is beyond the depth of the skin as it also starts from the core of a being, a
sound of mellifluous poetry, in the witnessing of spectacle, or in the spiritual journey of a
devotee.
Thank you for listening 