Contemporary Art and the Problem of Indiscernibles: An Adverbialist Approach

RESEARCH ARTICLE Contemporary Art and the Problem of Indiscernibles: An Adverbialist Approach Tomáš Koblížek Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, CZ ABSTRACT This paper addresses Arthur Danto’s claim that contemporary artworks, such as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, do not differ perceptually from ordinary objects, and that in order to see contemporary artworks as art the viewer has to move from mere experience to a meaning expressed by the work. I propose to supplement Danto’s thesis. I argue that, while some contemporary artworks may indeed be perceptually indistinguishable from ordinary objects, these works are distinguishable not only by means of meaning but also by means of a non-perceptual aesthetic experience. I then discuss two theories that might provide a model of such an aesthetic experience. First, I focus on James Shelley’s theory of non-perceptual aesthetic experience conceived as a representation of non-perceptual aesthetic properties. Second, I discuss Jérôme Dokic’s adverbialist theory, which sees aesthetic experience as a combination of nonaesthetic attitudes. I argue that the adverbialist model is the most promising candidate for solving our problem. The model must be extended, however, if it is to account for pragmatic attitudes in response to artworks. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Tomáš Koblížek Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, CZ [email protected] KEYWORDS: contemporary art; nonperceptual aesthetic experience; metacognitive feelings; adverbialism; Arthur Danto; James Shelley; Jérôme Dokic TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Koblížek, Tomáš. ‘Contemporary Art and the Problem of Indiscernibles: An Adverbialist Approach.’ Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics LX/ XVI, no 1 (2023): pp. 19–35. DOI: https://doi. org/10.33134/eeja.283 20Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 Arthur Danto’s greatest contribution to the philosophy of art can be summed up in the following two related claims: contemporary artworks such as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box do not differ perceptually from ordinary objects, and in order to see contemporary artworks as art the viewer has to move from mere experience to a meaning expressed by the work.1 The aim of this paper is to supplement Danto’s theory. I will demonstrate that, while some contemporary artworks are indeed perceptually indiscernible from ordinary objects, these works are distinguishable not only by means of meaning but also by means of an aesthetic experience that they elicit. More precisely, I will show that contemporary works that are perceptually indiscernible from their nonartistic counterparts are conceivable in terms of situations that invite the spectator to abandon the position of an observer, assuming instead an active, participatory role in the work. A non-perceptual aesthetic experience is then elicited as the work frustrates the pragmatic attitude of the viewer. This paper proceeds as follows. In the first part, I explain the sense in which I propose to supplement Danto’s approach. In the next section I move on to the evaluation of two theories that may provide a model of aesthetic experience vis-àvis contemporary artworks that are perceptually indiscernible from their non-artistic counterparts. Here, I focus on James Shelley’s theory of non-perceptual aesthetic experience, understood as a representation of non-perceptual aesthetic properties.2 I then consider Jérôme Dokic’s adverbialist theory. On this view, aesthetic experience consists of a combination of non-aesthetic attitudes.3 I argue that the adverbialist model is the most promising candidate for solving our problem. I. AFTER PERCEPTION: DANTO Let us begin with a brief overview of Danto’s account of contemporary art. First, it should be noted that Danto uses the term ‘contemporary art’ as an art-historical rather than an indexical term. In his account, contemporary art is a kind of art that has been produced since the 1960s, rather than current art or novelties in the art 1 See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) and After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). I will discuss Danto’s approach in Section I. It is well known that Danto slightly modified his approach to aesthetics in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003). These alterations, however, do not affect the argument presented here, since Danto repeats his earlier claim that perceptual aesthetic properties are not an essential facet of artistic works. For discussion, see Jonathan Gilmore, ‘Internal Beauty’, Inquiry 48 (2005): 145–54. 2 See James Shelley, ‘The Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (2003): 363–78. Shelley’s essay gave rise to an important debate, which I do not have the space to discuss here. See Noël Carroll, ‘Non-perceptual Aesthetic Properties: Comments for James Shelley’, British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (2004): 413–23, and Diarmuid Costello, ‘Kant and the Problem of Strong Non-perceptual Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2013): 277–98. 3 See Jérôme Dokic, ‘Aesthetic Experience as a Metacognitive Feeling? A Dual-Aspect View’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (2016): 69–88. To my knowledge, Dokic is the first author to apply the adverbialist approach to the domain of aesthetics. Nevertheless, his text was inspired by Sabine Döring, ‘What Is an Emotion? Musil’s Adverbial Theory’, Monist 97 (2013): 47–65. Döring advocates for a theory of emotions whereby evaluative qualities are conceived of in terms of a phenomenology of a ‘subject’s worldview’. 21Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 world.4 Danto points out that prototypical contemporary artworks are perceptually not altogether distinct from everyday objects, and takes Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) as a case in point. As he puts it, ‘[n]othing need mark the difference, outwardly, between Warhol’s Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes in the supermarket’.5 In Danto’s account, works of a contemporary kind represent a substantial departure from modernist art, which dominated the first half of the twentieth century. In short, for Danto modernism sought to distinguish between artworks and ordinary objects on the basis that artworks are made to be appreciated solely for their appearance, while ordinary objects are not primarily intended to exhibit any extraordinary perceptual qualities – although they may also be perceptually appreciated. Danto regarded contemporary art as no longer identifiable on these grounds; as Brillo Box illustrates, perception alone is not sufficient for discriminating between such artworks and ordinary objects. He therefore claims that the ‘arthood’ of contemporary artworks is not to be understood in aesthetic terms but with reference to the meaning expressed by the work.6 The aim of this paper is not to discuss Danto’s theory of contemporary art in detail but, as noted above, to propose a way of supplementing his account. My approach is as follows. First, although I take it as a historical fact that perceptual indiscernibility is an important aspect of contemporary artworks, I will not defend the claim that all art in the period concerned possesses the property of perceptual indiscernibility from ordinary objects. My starting point will be the more modest and rather uncontroversial claim that at least some of the prototypical contemporary works, such as Warhol’s Brillo Box or some of Claes Oldenburg’s installations discussed by Danto, instantiate the property of perceptual indiscernibility from ordinary objects. Second, I assume that contemporary artworks that are perceptually indiscernible from ordinary objects differ from these objects not only in terms of meaning but also in terms of aesthetic experience, which is not, however, elicited by the perceptual properties of the object. In this sense, I should speak of non-perceptual aesthetic experience. My main task in this paper is to explain the phenomenon of non-perceptual aesthetic experience and to demonstrate how such an experience, and not only the meaning, could play a distinguishing role. Third, I will take perceptual indiscernibility to mean indiscernibility with respect to properties perceptible through the five senses. This qualification is important because, as I argue in Section III, the difference between contemporary art and the non-art from which it is perceptually indistinguishable is largely to do with the manipulation of a work’s properties related to action of which we are aware but which we do not perceive in the sense I have just defined. I also use the term ‘perceptible through 4 See Danto, After the End of Art, 9–10. Compare with the ‘generic’ use of the term ‘contemporary art’ in Nathalie Heinich, Le paradigme de l’art contemporain: Structures d’une révolution artistique (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 24–30; for important discussion of different uses of the term, see Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013), 24–29. 5 Danto, After the End of Art, 13; see also Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 33–53, Danto discusses Warhol’s Brillo Boxes on page 44. 6 See, for example, Danto, After the End of Art, 13, 15–16, and Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 90–114. Regarding this point, Shusterman offers an interesting perspective on Danto when he speaks of the ‘anaestheticization of aesthetics’ by Danto; see Richard Shusterman, ‘The End of Aesthetic Experience’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): 29–41. 22Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 the five senses’ as synonymous with ‘sensory’ and ‘sensual’, all referring to low-level sensory properties (lines, colours, and so on).7 Fourth, this implies that by non-perceptual experience in contemporary art I refer to an experience that is not elicited by the properties perceptible through the five senses. It does not, however, follow from this claim that contemporary works do not possess perceptual properties so defined, and that these properties may not for their part elicit a perceptual aesthetic experience: one could certainly admire the perceptual properties of the Brillo Box. It would be interesting to ask whether such admiration would relate to the properties of the artwork or of the mere real thing from which the artwork is perceptually indiscernible. Whatever the answer might be, it is nonetheless crucial for my claim that, in contemporary artworks that are perceptually indiscernible from mere real things, not only a meaning but also a non-perceptual aesthetic experience plays a distinguishing role vis-à-vis non-artistic objects. Such a claim does not rule out a situation in which a non-perceptual aesthetic experience is supplemented by a perceptual one. Fifth, the following discussion does not concern contemporary literature or music but draws on conceptual art (including conceptual photography), installation art, and land art. This is in no way meant to imply, however, that contemporary art equals only these art forms and other forms could not play the role of example. On the contrary, there could be a parallel debate on forms of contemporary literature mimicking non-literary writing, such as Édouard Levé’s Journal (2004), which makes use of journalistic discourse, or the contemporary music known as musique concrète, such as Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien (1970), which consists of real-life sounds recorded on a beach. These examples could also be used to demonstrate that contemporary works that do not perceptually differ from non-artistic objects may elicit an aesthetic experience that I define as non-perceptual. II. BEYOND THE FIVE SENSES: SHELLEY We can consider two approaches to the problem of non-perceptual aesthetic experience. A non-perceptual aesthetic experience could be conceived of either in terms of its intentional content or in terms of its phenomenology. In this section I discuss a conception of the first kind, and in the following section a conception of the second kind.8 In 2003, James Shelley published a remarkable essay, ‘Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, which primarily concerns Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, as well as other works that fall into the genre of readymades, and some examples of conceptual art. On Shelley’s account, however intellectual the artwork may appear, it has aesthetic properties whose presence we do not infer but which forcibly strike or move us.9 Nevertheless, 7 I therefore accept what James Shelley calls Beardsley’s ‘narrow definition’ of perception’: ‘When [Beardsley] says that the properties on which aesthetic properties depend are essentially perceptual, he means that those properties are essentially perceptible by means of the five senses.’ Shelley, ‘Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, 372–73. Comp. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 31–32. 8 Here I follow up on Lamarque’s claim that ‘being a work – certainly being a work of art – must make a difference and the difference […] must be realizable either in the phenomenology or the intentional content of an experience, broadly conceived’. Peter Lamarque, ‘On Perceiving Conceptual Art’, in Philosophy and Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14. 9 Shelley follows the non-inferentialist position, as defended by Frank Sibley in ‘Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic’, Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 135–59. Sibley’s approach, as well as that of other aesthetic non-inferentialists, has recently been challenged by Dan Cavedon-Taylor, ‘Reasoned and Unreasoned Judgement: On Inference, Acquaintance and Aesthetic Normativity’, British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (2017): 1–17. 23Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 for Shelley, these aesthetic properties are not perceived through the five senses, thus allowing us to speak of non-perceptual art. In what follows, I summarize Shelley’s argument and consider to what extent it helps us in solving the problem of nonperceptual aesthetic experience. To begin, Shelley puts forward three propositions that are typically at stake regarding non-perceptual artworks: (R) ‘Artworks necessarily have aesthetic properties that are relevant to their appreciation as artworks.’ (S) ‘Aesthetic properties necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses.’ (X) ‘There exist artworks that need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks.’10 Shelley claims that philosophers of art typically adopt one of two positions. The first position is to accept (R) and (S) and reject (X), which is tantamount either to denying that contemporary, non-perceptual artworks are in fact artworks or to reducing nonperceptual to perceptual art. The second position is to argue for (S) and (X) and reject (R), which implies a dissociation between art and aesthetics. I will not unpack Shelley’s discussion of the two positions. Instead, I turn directly to his favoured one – namely, to accept (R) and (X) and reject (S). This yields the following triad: (R) ‘Artworks necessarily have aesthetic properties that are relevant to their appreciation as artworks.’ (X) ‘There exist artworks that need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks.’ (¬S) ‘Aesthetic properties do not necessarily depend, at least in part, on properties perceived by means of the five senses.’ This trifurcated position requires close commentary, since Shelley presents it as the solution to the problem of non-perceptual art. Shelley’s position on perception is complex. He does not claim that the aesthetic properties of non-perceptual artworks are simply non-perceptual. The claim is instead that these properties are non-perceptual in one specific way, insofar as they do not depend on the five senses.11 Thus, Shelley suggests that aesthetic properties such as being daring, impudent, irreverent, witty, clever, or any other property one may attribute to Duchamp’s Fountain12 should be more precisely conceived of as nonsensuous aesthetic properties, for we neither see nor hear wittiness, impudence, 10 Shelley, ‘Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, 364. 11 Shelley thus follows Sibley’s definition of perception. This allows him to consider an aesthetic experience to be perceptual even though it is not based on the five senses. See ibid., 372–73. 12 This list of Fountain’s aesthetic properties comes from Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 93–94. 24Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 cleverness, or any other such property. These properties, however, can still be construed as perceptual aesthetic properties insofar as they strike or move us. Thus, on Shelley’s view, the aesthetic experience of Fountain can be judged as the perceptual effect of a non-sensuous cause. Or, to put it another way, Shelley proposes a conception of non-perceptual aesthetic experience as the perception of non-sensuous aesthetic properties.13 What issues might there be with such a view of aesthetic experience? One may countenance a broad range of objections that are traditionally levelled against aesthetic realism, which is a term that one may associate with Shelley’s theory: it conceives of non-perceptual aesthetic experiences as veridical representations of non-perceptual aesthetic properties rather than nonrepresentational states, such as delight or pleasure.14 Shelley might therefore be considered to be a ‘non-perceptual aesthetic realist’. In what follows, however, I will not recount the objections generally raised against realism, also due to Shelley’s later claim that the relation between his theory and realism is not straightforward.15 Instead, I will provide further observations regarding the Fountain example, and use these observations to identify problematic points in Shelley’s theory. Let us look closer at the aesthetic properties that Shelley attributes to Fountain.16 In his words, the object strikes us with impudence, irreverence, daring, wit, and so forth. To articulate an aesthetic judgement such as ‘Fountain is witty’ can therefore only mean to consider ‘wittiness’ to be a property exemplified by the object, which strikes or moves us. Again, Shelley points out that we do not simply infer that Fountain has the property of being witty: we rather perceive the wittiness itself. This analysis, however, does not take into consideration several important aspects of Fountain. Most importantly, the witty effect would not take place without subverting the spectatorial expectations that we inevitably carry with us when attending an exhibition. Simply put, the spectator expects an extraordinary object that can be appreciated as manifesting artistic mastery. Nevertheless, being confronted with Fountain, these expectations are immediately frustrated and stay unfulfilled.17 This frustration has, then, a double form. First, the spectator’s expectations are not frustrated because they are simply confronted with something other than the expected fine artwork. Instead, they are confronted with the very opposite of what 13 The term ‘aesthetic experience’ does not appear in Shelley’s paper. I follow Noël Carroll’s reading of Shelley as defending the idea that non-perceptual artworks support ‘aesthetic experience, appropriately understood’ (Carroll, ‘Non-perceptual Aesthetic Properties’, 422; see also 413 and 419). I consider Carroll’s reading legitimate as Shelley himself speaks about aesthetic properties that ‘strike us with their presence’ (Shelley, ‘Problem of Non-perceptual Art’, 372; italics my own). 14 We may refer to Roger Scruton’s criticism of the realist view on aesthetic experience in his Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 153–54. Scruton’s criticism has been further elaborated on by Malcolm Budd, ‘Aesthetic Realism and Emotional Qualities of Music’, British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (2005): 111–22. 15 Shelley claims his theory is not about ‘what sort of value there is, but is rather about what sort of valuing there is’; see James Shelley, ‘Against Value Empiricism in Aesthetics’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2010): 716. This claim can also be applied to Shelley’s claims about aesthetic properties. 16 Any other example of non-perceptual art could also be used to support the following argument. 17 Robert Hopkins makes an analogical claim in commenting upon conceptual art in ‘Speaking through Silence: Conceptual Art and Conversational Implicature’, in Goldie and Schellekens, Philosophy and Conceptual Art, 65. 25Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 they had anticipated – namely, a vulgar object. Second, the opposite of what the spectator expects paradoxically resembles an anticipated work in certain respects. This is because, at least from one perspective, Fountain bears the formal qualities of a sculpture (such as Constantin Brancusi’s Torse de jeune fille, 1922). These observations lead to a twofold objection to Shelley’s model. First, the assumption of non-perceptual aesthetic properties is redundant for explaining Fountain’s wittiness. Second, there is a lack of evidence for non-perceptual aesthetic properties. To make sense of the first objection, note that Shelley considers three elements in his argument: (1) Fountain’s perceptual non-aesthetic properties; (2) Fountain’s nonperceptual aesthetic properties, and (3) Fountain’s striking effect, where (2) and (3) provide the distinction between the artistic and the non-artistic object. To explain Fountain’s wittiness, there is a good reason to consider (3): Duchamp’s work can indeed be perceived as witty only if it has this effect on its spectator. Conversely, there seems to be no reason to commit to a specific set of properties (2): as made clear above, the wittiness can be satisfactorily explained as a frustrated expectation provoked by the work being thoughtfully placed in a particular context. Without an additional argument for assuming the non-perceptual aesthetic properties, only a more modest claim is plausible. This is the claim that Fountain’s wittiness is not a striking property but the striking effect itself: in other words, a metacognitive feeling inspired by the artwork.18 Regarding the second objection, the only elements for which we have evidence concerning Fountain are the thoughtfully placed object, which is perceived, and the striking effect, which is felt. There seems to be no evidence for non-perceptual aesthetic properties. Shelley could argue that the striking effect is itself evidence for such properties: a feeling of wittiness perhaps indicates a property of being witty as its cause. We are not, however, provided with an explanation of how a feeling could play such a role in referring to a corresponding property. It seems safer to construct a theory considering solely the perceptual non-aesthetic properties of an object and its effects upon the spectator. To summarize my position hitherto, I sympathize with Shelley’s claim that nonperceptual art inspires aesthetic experiences that are independent of the five senses. Furthermore, Shelley’s observation that non-perceptual art strikes us or moves us is important. But, as I have argued, we should not identify this experience with a representation of non-perceptual aesthetic properties. As an alternative, I will offer a different account of non-perceptual aesthetic experience. III. DOKIC: ADVERBIAL EXPERIENCE Let us now move to the adverbialist model, which was recently introduced into aesthetics by Jérôme Dokic and constitutes a characteristically phenomenological theory of aesthetic experience. Since the theory is not widely known, I will first present its key premises. Then I will discuss the suitability of Dokic’s approach for solving the 18 Our claim also concerns Nanay’s aesthetic theory, which operates on the presupposition of ‘semi-formal properties’. These properties are constitutively dependent on formal properties such as lines, shapes, colours, and the relations between them; see Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 93–94. For Nanay, then, the difference between Fountain and its non-artistic correlate concerns semi-formal properties, while the formal properties of the two objects are identical. I would argue against Nanay that the difference is not one of properties but of experiences: the former elicits a (metacognitive) feeling of surprise; the latter does not. 26Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 problem of non-perceptual aesthetic experience in contemporary artworks that do not perceptually differ from ordinary objects. The adverbialist approach has in past years been discussed largely in the domain of the theory of consciousness. It is usually contrasted with the relational view including (1) the naïve realism that accounts for consciousness in terms of the external relation between consciousness and its object and (2) first-order tracking theories that view the intentional content of consciousness as a representation of the environment.19 One of the main motivations for adverbialists to look for an alternative view is that relationists have difficulty explaining the intentional relation to non-existent entities – typically fictional ones – because any relation requires relata. The adverbialist solution to this problem consists in considering conscious states not as a relation to an object but rather as a matter of thinking in a certain way. As Uriah Kriegel puts it, ‘[a]ccording to adverbialism about intentionality, having a dragon thought is not a matter of bearing the thinking-about relation to dragons, but of engaging in the activity of thinking dragon-wise’.20 In other words, the adverbialism considers consciousness not in terms of being about an x but in terms of representing it x-wise. Although Dokic in his text on adverbialism applied to aesthetic experience does not explicitly refer to the aforementioned debates, it is clear that the approach he offers corresponds with the main facets of adverbialism about consciousness. This correspondence is detectable in two passages. First, Dokic claims that aesthetic experience is not an intentional relation to some sort of property but rather a way of considering an object. As he puts it, [a]esthetic experience is not itself an intentional attitude. […] A fortiori, it is not intentionally about any aesthetic property or value. […] It is an aesthetic way or mode of considering, and perhaps interacting with, the world and in particular the aesthetic object. To have an aesthetic experience is to view the world aesthetically.21 In other words, like Kriegel, for whom thinking of a dragon is not a relation to this object but rather the activity of thinking dragon-wise, for Dokic the aesthetic experience does not consist in an intentional attitude towards an aesthetic property but in a way of experiencing an object. Second, the correspondence between Dokic’s model of aesthetic experience and adverbialism about consciousness is evident in a passage where he explicitly contrasts his approach with aesthetic models that consider the aesthetic experience in terms of 19 Kriegel is one of the main defenders of adverbialism about consciousness, see especially Uriah Kriegel, ‘The Dispensability of (Merely) Intentional Objects’, Philosophical Studies 141 (2008): 79–95, and The Sources of Intentionality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For critical assessments of Kriegel’s approach see Alexander Dinges, ‘The Many-Relations Problem for Adverbialism’, Analysis 75 (2015): 231–37, or Casey Woodling, ‘The Limits of Adverbialism about Intentionality’, Inquiry 59 (2016): 488–512. A metaphysical version of adverbialism may be found in Kyle Banick, ‘How to Be an Adverbialist about Phenomenal Intentionality’, Synthese 198 (2021): 661–86. It is noteworthy that Kriegel himself reflects on the conditions of our aesthetic judgements; see his ‘A Fitting-Attitude Approach to Aesthetic Value?’, British Journal of Aesthetics (forthcoming). Although Kriegel does not invoke adverbialism here, his approach corresponds with this line of thought. 20 Kriegel, ‘Dispensability’, 79. 21 Dokic, ‘Aesthetic Experience’, 72. 27Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 an intentional relation to properties. Dokic speaks first of the ‘Perceptual Model’ that in his view relies on an analogy with sensory perception. As he puts it, [o]n this model, aesthetic experience is an intentional attitude whose content involves some aesthetic property or value. Spontaneous aesthetic judgements (‘This sculpture is marvellous’) can then be conceived as endorsing the aesthetic contents of the underlying aesthetic experiences, just as ordinary perceptual judgements (‘This flower is odorous’) endorse the contents of perceptual experiences.22 Furthermore, Dokic contrasts the adverbialist approach with what he labels the ‘Attitudinal Model’, which views the aesthetic experience in terms of an intentional relation to non-aesthetic properties. Dokic holds that, on this model, aesthetic experience is an intentional attitude, but, in contrast to the Perceptual Model, its content does not involve any aesthetic property or value. Aesthetic experience is about a nonaesthetic state of affairs, but it is still a sui generis attitude, that is, an attitude that is specific to, or at least typical of, the aesthetic domain.23 The key question concerning Dokic’s adverbialism is as follows: if aesthetic experience is neither an intentional non-aesthetic relation to aesthetic properties nor an intentional aesthetic attitude to non-aesthetic properties but simply a way of experiencing the world, what sort of experiencing is it? To clarify the ‘way’ of aesthetic experiencing, Dokic claims that aesthetic experience is a modification of non-aesthetic attitudes. More specifically, he speaks of a combination of pleasure and interest as elicited by familiar and unfamiliar aspects of a perceived object.24 More concretely, by stressing the aspects of unfamiliarity and interest he argues against the ‘one-aspect view’ of aesthetic experience, which takes it to be a solely pleasurable mental state arising from processing fluency: Dokic refers here to the theory of Rolf Reber, for whom there is a direct proportionality between processing fluency and aesthetic response.25 For Dokic, nevertheless, the pleasure and the processing fluency alone cannot explain why we keep attending to a work. If we recognize an object easily, there seems to be no reason to carry on observing it, but 22 Ibid., 70. 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Ibid., 79–80. Dokic builds here on empirical studies by Berlyne. See Daniel Berlyne, Aesthetics and Psychobiology (New York: Appleton, 1971). Besides Berlyne, Dokic refers to the following works that critically discuss the role of pleasure in aesthetic experience: Paul J. Silvia, Exploring the Psychology of Interest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); ‘Human Emotions and Aesthetic Experience’, in Aesthetic Science: Connecting Minds, Brain and Experience, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura and Stephen E. Palmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 250–75; and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’expérience esthétique (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). See also Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen and David Sackris, ‘Feeling the Aesthetic: A Pluralist Sentimentalist Theory of Aesthetic Experience’, Estetika 57 (2020): 116–34, defending a ‘pluralist view’ on aesthetic experience against Prinz, who conceives of aesthetic experience in terms of a singular emotion (wonder). See Jesse Prinz, ‘Emotion and Aesthetic Value’, in Aesthetic Mind, ed. Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71–88. 25 See Rolf Reber et al., ‘Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?’ Personality and Social Psychology Review 8 (2004): 364–82. 34Koblížek Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.283 Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315740218 Gilmore, Jonathan. ‘Internal Beauty.’ Inquiry 48 (2005): 145–54. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1080/00201750510022745 Goldie, Peter and Elisabeth Schellekens, eds. Philosophy and Conceptual Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Heinich, Nathalie. Le paradigme de l’art contemporain: Structures d’une révolution artistique. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Hopkins, Robert. ‘Speaking through Silence: Conceptual Art and Conversational Implicature.’ In Goldie and Schellekens, Philosophy and Conceptual Art, 51–67. 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