Suchergebnisse

Art perception is viewed as a conscious or unconscious deciphering operation which may or may not lead to a true understanding. It requires a more or less complex code which has been more or less completely mastered. The work of art (like any cultural object) may disclose significations at diff levels according to the deciphering stencil applied to it. Uninitiated perception, reduced to the grasping of primary significations, is a mutilated perception. Through sociol'al observation it is possible to reveal, effectively realized, forms of perception corresponding to the diff levels, which theoretical analysis frames by an abstract distinction. The most uninitiated perception is always inclined to go beyond the level of sensations & affections. The work of art considered as a symbolic asset only exists as such for a person who has the means to appropriate it, ie, to decipher it. An agent's degree of art competence is measured by the degree to which he masters the set of instruments (ie, interpretative schemes) for the appropriation of the work of art, available at a given time. Interpretative schemes are the prerequisite for the deciphering of works of art offered to a given society at a particular time. Art competence can be provisionally defined as the preliminary knowledge of the possible divisions into complementary classes of a universe. This system of classification enables each element of the universe to be placed in a class necessarily determined in relation to another class. Artistic competence can therefore be defined as the previous knowledge of the strictly artistic principles of division which enable a representation to be located (through the classification of its stylistic indications) among the universe of art. The art code as a system of possible principles of division into complementary classes of the universe of representations offered to a particular society at a given time is in the nature of a soc instit. This soc instit must be considered a historically constituted system, founded on soc reality. The modal readability of a work of art varies according to the divergence between the code which it objectively requires & the code as an historically constituted instit. In each period, the rules defining the readability of contemporary art are but a special application of the general law of readability. Familiarization by repeated perceptions is the privileged mode of acquiring the means of appropriating (in a cultural sense) works of art. These theses are applied to a discussion of art educ & the function of the museum. M. Maxfield.