Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content-related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. Attention (...) to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman’s attempt to analyse the expressiveness of artworks in semantic terms has been widely criticised. In this paper I try to show how the use of an adapted version of his concept of exemplification, as proposed by Mark Textor, can help to alleviate the worst problems with his theory of expression. More particularly I argue that the recognition of an intention, which is central to Textor’s account of exemplification, is also fundamental to our understanding of expressiveness in art. Moreover (...) I propose that the recognition of this intention depends on our interpretation of the artwork – an insight Goodman tried to capture with his assertion that our attributions of expressive properties to artworks function metaphorically. The realisation of the context-dependence of our expressive judgements about art and, hence, of the central role interpretation plays in these judgements, I contend, counts in favour of theories of expression like Goodman’s that focus on semantic concerns. (shrink)

This thesis is about moods in works of art, and how moods expressed in art can change how we view the world. Among those who speak of the value of discussing moods in philosophical aesthetics, it is normally assumed that the value of moods is in the way they are induced in the viewer of the work. In this thesis, I will argue that such an argument is not the best. Those who think moods are not relevant to aesthetics have (...) only to argue either that being induced with emotions is not an ideal way of approaching art, or that such reactions as being induced with mood belong to the more rare cases of approaching art. Therefore, focusing on how moods are induced hinders the potential of discussing moods in art. Instead I argue that the value of moods is in the way they are expressed. I argue that moods can be understood as a form of symbolic schemas. They affect how the world appears, and how one sorts and organizes things in the world. One can therefore use moods as resources for getting knowledge about the world. Because some works of art express moods, where expression is understood as metaphorical exemplification, they make the viewer epistemically aware of the mood. Thus one can imagine being in the mood expressed. Thereby moods can lead to knowledge, also in cases where they are not literally induced. When one succesfully imagines being in an expressed mood, parts of the world are sorted and organized differently as in accordance with the mood. (shrink)