# Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception  ## Metadata - Author: [[Bence Nanay]] - Full Title: Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: The book "Aesthetics As Philosophy of Perception" by Bence Nanay explores the concept of attention in aesthetic experiences. It argues that attention can be both focused on a single object and distributed across its many properties. This unique way of attending to art and beauty is central to understanding aesthetic appreciation, but it is not a universal phenomenon and can vary across cultures and history. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/269643277 - Source File: Aesthetics as philosophy of perception by Nanay.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > I want to return to the specific kind of property that has played an important role in understanding the aesthetic appreciation of pictures (while acknowledging that there may be other properties that we rou- tinely attribute to pictures when we appreciate them aesthetically). It is the property that Budd describes as ‘the crucial characteristic of pictorial art, namely, the *interrelationship* between the marks on the surface and what is depicted in them’ (Budd 1995, p. 58, see also p. 54). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jknd3h22enfyh46ngz76e3d5)) > Properties of this kind (under different labels) have triggered lively discussion recently, mainly in connection with the concept of ‘inflection’ (see Podro 1991, 1998; Lopes 2005; Hopkins 2010; Nanay 2010b). Hopkins calls these properties ‘inflected properties’ and argues that ‘a full characterization of [them] needs to make reference to the surface’s design (conceived as such)’ (Hopkins 2010). I myself called them ‘design-scene properties’, where a ‘design-scene property’ is a ‘relational property that cannot be fully characterized without reference to both the picture’s design and to the depicted object’ (Nanay 2010b, p. 194). In the light of the threefoldness account above, which resolves the ambiguity of the concept of ‘depicted object’ in this definition, I should say that a design- scene property is a relational property that cannot be fully characterized without reference to both the picture’s surface and to the three-dimensional object visually encoded in the surface. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jknd4bbcz9wtzzqyvwvka0fh)) > A key element in any appreciation of a pictorial work of art is the awareness of design-scene properties (this is what Budd suggests when he says that ‘the *interrelationship* between the marks on the surface and what is depicted in them’ is ‘*the* crucial characteristic of pictorial art’ (Budd 1995, p. 58, the second emphasis is mine)). When we are admiring a Miró drawing and the way two simple curved lines somehow manage to depict an expressive human face, what we are attending to is exactly a design-scene property: the relational property partly determined by the shape property of the two-dimensional curved line on the canvas and partly determined by the three-dimensional depicted face. And when we are appreciating Cézanne’s landscapes, one thing that enhances our aesthetic appreciation is to see the interrelationship between the three- dimensional depicted fascicles of pine needles and the two-dimensional single brushstrokes on the canvas. What Frank Sibley would call our ‘critical and evaluative discourse’ (Sibley 1959, p. 422) is full of references to design-scene properties (from which Sibley would conclude that it is an aesthetic property—see Chapter 4): to the way the depicted object emerges from the marks on the surface or to the way the depicted object is represented by the marks on the surface. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jknd5fb6wry8ggffrfccxkcg)) - Tags: [[psychedelic aesthetics paper]] - Note: really good quote for the idea I am trying to get at.