Review of Bjarne Sode Funch 'Psychology of Art Appreciation' more

The Psychology of Art Appreciation. By BJARNE SODE FUNCH. Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. 1997. pp 312. 30 illus. £50 00. THIS BOOK is broader in range than those on the psychology of picture perception and broader, yet again, than the 1992 book Emerging Visions of the Aesthetic Process, edited by Cupchik and Lásló, dedicated to Daniel Berlyne. It covers, in succession, the topics of the psycho-physical (PP), gestalt (G), cognitive (C), psychoanalytic (P), and existential-phenomenological (EP) approaches to art appreciation. Close reading indicates that it is not simply a catalogue of these different approaches but a survey leading up to the author's own view, which he describes as a version of the existentialphenomenological approach. The authors whose work Funch describes are well known to me, and I suppose the community the book addresses. I am not sure that readers of this journal would appreciate a string of names. To the best of my belief their work is adequately described and it would be invidious, though tempting, to single out any author for special consideration. Funch ignores Gibson's troubles with picture perception in C, but this poses no threat to the coherence of his argument, and Kristeva and Lacan were, mercifully, left out of P. One weakness of Funch's account of P was that he failed to appreciate the full thrust of Gombrich's dissection of Freud (which he mentions in his bibliography), which turned an unusable theory into a usable one. Instead he dwells on the topic of sublimation, for which he cannot be criticized as it is a common strategy amongst commentators on Freud. On the surface, at least, all of the theorizing seems to be open to analysis and criticism The point at which Funch's analysis falters is over the problem of 'art'. Psychologists generally fail to see that the word 'art' describes a skill, a category of objects, and a value, all of which have become horribly muddled over the past two centuries. Paul Kristeller's seminal essay, 'The Modem System of the Arts' (conveniently reprinted in Peter Kivy's collection Essays on the History of Aesthetics, Rochester, 1992), and Meyer Abrams' 'From Addison to Kant: Modern Aesthetics and the Exemplary Art' (reprinted in Doing Things with Texts, New York, 1991) should become compulsory reading for any future writers on the subject of 'art'. 'Art' might mean skilfully produced paintings, referring to the work of the Masters (which they most frequently were), unskilful but 'expressive' paintings produced by children and chimpanzees (though what chim panzees might express is a problem), skilfully produced urinals, as used by the unskilful but highly thoughtful Duchamp, or unskilfully but highly thoughtfully produced detritus, like Piero Manzoni's Merde. I would hesitate to suggest that it is impossible to produce a coherent theory which would cover such a mixed range of phenomena, but it should be recognized that such a mixed range is covered by the word 'art' More difficult is the notion of 'art appreciation' itself and this is a problem that Funch addresses throughout his text. Is art appreciation like the appreciation of a cup of tea on a hot summer's day in that it offers soul-quenching, if not thirst-quenching, pleasure? If art is appreciated because it offers pleasure, is there a distinctive kind of pleasure offered by art in general or are different kinds of pleasures offered by different kinds of art? Is there such a thing as a distinctively aesthetic pleasure and if so is it only offered by art? If there is such a distinctive pleasure and it is offered by nature as well as art, then what is the distinctiveness of art? Perhaps appreciation has nothing to do with pleasure and a great deal to do with discrimination: a class in art appreciation typically invites one to pay attention to different characteristics of different painters The same class might also invite one to make judgements of preference between those various painters. In some hands, appreciation is simply a matter of being able to talk a lot about works of art, possibly not even saying anything much about them. All of these questions and problems are well known to philosophical aestheticians and while I find it a pity that Funch only addresses them en passant I can see how psychologists, generally, fall into that trap. For psychologists, objects and behaviour are unproblematically there open for inspection, many, if not the majority, of them have failed to see how they are constructing their own subjects (see now Kurt Danziger's Constructing the Subject Historical Origins of Psychological Research, Cambridge, 1994). Paintings are made out of colours and shapes: Rembrandt is a bit difficult to start with, so let's start with ordinary colours and shapes, or paintings are rather too precious to be let loose on schoolchildren, so let's give them photographs. [Psychologists even use drawings in object recognition tests, as if they were unmediated representations of objec-ts!] At a different level, the experts know which paintings are good and bad, so let them be the measure against which children's preferences may be measured. And at a different level again, children's art develops, so let us measure their learning growth. My own preference would have been to give the conceptual problems an airing first before ploughing into an investigation of psychologists' experiments. Be that as it may, the problems are addressed as they occur, if somewhat tactfully and far less roughly than they would be in the hands of philosophers. For anyone wanting material to start an argument with psychologists, this book offers an excellent resource For me the most important part of the book is towards the end, when Funch starts to formulate his own views. Despite the fact that philosophers have criticized the notion of the aesthetic experience, there would seem to be still more to say on the subject. For Funch, there is such a thing as aesthetic experience, which has 'an intense and exceptional phenomenology', but it is a 'relatively rare occurrence that cannot account for art appreciation in general'. Consequentially 'this is most likely a reason for their failure to account for the profound relationship between art and human e xistence which general observations indicate' (p 258). This has direct consequences for aesthetic education: no amount of learning about works of art will lead to an aesthetic experience of them, let alone having an aesthetic experience. So what is the point of aesthetic education?: 'a less traditional approach to education could also include the preparation of an appropriate attitude to encountering works of art and even psychological guidance for people who have already had an aesthetic experience' (p. 267). The cost effectiveness of such teaching would hardly have gained any support from Mrs Thatcher, particularly in the light of the recognition that 'the aesthetic experience seems to be a once only occurrence rarely repeated in encounters between the sa person and the same me work of art. Generally, a work of art evoking an aesthetic experience is highly appreciated afterwards, but the appreciation rarely reaches the intensity of the first experience'. (p. 260) There is reason for investing in people's ability to discriminate between true and false Rembrandts because that can increase their market value. Art appreciation, generally, has more to do with cognitive stock than enhancing one's experience of the world - ask your local museum curator about how he or she feels about its contents and wait for words like 'interesting', 'important', and 'valuable'. Well, that is my conclusion from Funch's argument and probably taken in a different direction from one which he would wish. It is not altogether coincidental that good literary criticism can be far more effective than even the best art criticism in directing one's attention to the way in which an art form works. That is a proposition which would need testing, of course. But this would take us even further into the mire than simple talk about representational paintings, because if the production of works of art, literature, and indeed music, can take us into an exploration of the worlds of feelings and emotions, what precisely is the status of those worlds? This is a book to be read for the questions which It raises rather than the answers which it offers. It is expensive, but is also handsomely produced and a joy to hold. For readers unfamiliar with the range of speculation on the psychology of art appreciation, it will offer very useful guidance and would be a better investment than other, more specialized collections. It offers an excellent resource for further debate and who knows? one day we might find a group of psychologists prepared to engage in constructive debate with philosophers in this highly contentious field. RICHARD WOODFIELD The Nottingham Trent University