Art Theory and Psychological Aesthetics
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (23 December 2022) | Viewed by 34489
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue considers the long-lasting controversy between art theory and psychological aesthetics about the nature of psychological facts in art. The current state of the psychological aesthetics must be seen in the light of its history. Psychological aesthetics as a name emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, when Johann Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848) published a book entitled Ideas on Psychological Aesthetics (1793). The book was provoked by the newly established theoretical field of aesthetics, initiated by Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) who elaborated a new discipline as a science of sensual knowledge. Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) in his On experimental aesthetics (1871) dealt with different aesthetic issues which can be empirically discovered by investigating preferences of subjects when perceiving objects. Psychological aesthetics and its interest in the psychological foundation of aesthetic experience was an important part of the development of aesthetics in recent decades of the nineteenth and at the turn of the twentieth century. Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) in his two volume Aesthetics (1903/1906) with the subtitle Psychology of Art and Beauty concluded that aesthetics was a psychological discipline. Psychological aesthetics found extensive application in experimental psychology at the twentieth century. After the Second World War, the term psychological aesthetics have been used sporadically in the borderline context of disciplines such as psychology of art and empirical aesthetics.
Today, the return of interest in psychological aesthetics, which belongs to the oldest tradition of psychological approaches to art, is related to the challenges of art theory to articulate the psychological significance of those artistic practices that remain outside the norms and limits of institutional creativity. The contemporary function of psychological aesthetics as a basis for theoretical concepts and speculations about the nature of aesthetic phenomena in the arts intersects with the expansion of art theory to the context of new psychological situations and new psychological categories. Contributors are invited to submit articles examining the role of convergence between art theory and psychological aesthetics focusing a broad range of topics: aesthetic property, aesthetic experience, definitions of art, ontology of art, representation in art, creative process, history of ideas, psychology of art, and empirical aesthetics.
Prof. Dr. Peter Tzanev
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- aesthetic experience
- psychology of aesthetic categories
- aesthetic value
- art appreciation
- imagination
- empathy
- artistic eccentricity
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