Matters of Art and Practice: In Dialogue with Things (RJ)

The aim is to explain what abilities and skills enable artistic creation
and aesthetic experience and can explain the central place of the arts in
human life. The project brings together my previous research on creativity, art,
and embodied embedded cognition. Using examples from the visual arts, pottery, modern dance and jazz music, I show that the ability to appreciate and produce art objects depends on bodily, perceptual and emotional processes that support interaction between humans and artifacts at a pre-reflective level, and describe how the artist painstakingly refines them in the search of a unique style. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges in a mostly wordless dialogue with the artwork that requires listening and openness to diversity, and is similar to the dialogue we have with those who are closest to us.