# The Creative Audience  ## Metadata - Author: [[Noel Carrol]] - Full Title: The Creative Audience - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Document Tags: [[favorite]] - Summary: The document explores how audiences engage with fictional artworks using their imaginations, emphasizing the creative role of the audience in interpreting and responding to art. It discusses various types of imaginative engagements employed by readers, viewers, and listeners when interacting with fiction, highlighting the importance of the fictive imagination in generating emotional responses and enhancing storytelling experiences. Additionally, it delves into concepts such as mindreading in fiction, where audiences fill in gaps, interpret characters' mental states, and explore the creative afterlife of narratives through simulation and imaginative engagement. The audience's role in co-creating and enhancing fictional works is a key focus throughout the text. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/148263111 - Source File: The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture eds Noël Carroll_ Jonathan Gilmore.pdf ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > This article restricts its purview to fictional artworks across the various media. However, this is not to say that some of the operations of the audience’s imagination with respect to fiction do not also obtain in nonfictional art forms, such as orchestral music. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9bv2d49gesj8ssswhp4qv8)) - Note: is he going to explain how this works? > As noted by R. G. Collingwood, there is an enduring theory of art in the Western tradition—which he calls the technical theory of art—that treats the audience’s response to art as passive and uncreative.3 ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9cap5yws4g3fcz1kz0ks61)) > R. G. Collingwood, The Priniciples of Art (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 17–20. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9caysnyr5pz9k2ykd9y6z5)) - Tags: [[toread]] > Referring to the judgment of free beauty, Kant writes of a sensation . . . whose universal communicability a judgment of taste postulates, as the quickening of the two powers (imagination and the understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but, as a result of the prompting of the given presentation nonetheless accordant. . . the facilitated play of the two men- tal powers (imagination and understanding) quickened by their reciprocal harmony.4 This is admittedly a dense passage. What Kant appears to have in mind here is that when one encounters the kind of stimulus that we are wont to call beautiful, our mental powers—those of imagination and understanding—play with it, rather than, as is the way of ordinary cognition, subsuming it under a determinate concept. Typically, in everyday experience, the imagination synthesizes various perspectives of, for instance, a horse (say the front and the left side) and fills in what is unseen, and the understanding files this under the determinate concept horse. But the aes- thetic encounter is quite different. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9ck96myczgx0g978adgb84)) > When aesthetically engaging with clouds, for example, we do not subsume the stimulus under the determinate concept cloud. Rather, we let our minds play with it. Our imagination synthesizes it first as a face, perhaps a familiar one, and then as a puff of cotton, and maybe then as a mountain, or vanilla ice cream, and so on, with no determinate point of closure. The imagination and the understanding conspire in a game of seeing-as. There is no determinate concept—such as mountain—under which the stimulus must be subsumed. This is not to say that we do not realize that we are looking at a cloud, but only that in the process of experiencing it aestheti- cally, our minds explore its aspects freely, that is, not constrained to see it under just one defining concept. Instead, we are free to allow our imaginations to roam over it, organizing it in accordance with various patterns with no necessary end in view. The limit of the experience is the limit of our imagination. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9cxtjk9wtr616cght3m0m1)) > Here, we do not subsume Juliet under the determinate concept of the sun. Rather, we are meant to treat the sun as the source of associations that can be seen to fit Juliet or, to enlist a more technical mode of speech, that can be seen to map onto her. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9d0jmtkk5cksrz8ycmeycp)) > In contrast, the imagination is playing with the concept of the sun, selecting certain aspects for contemplation and explaining them in a way analogous to our previous example of cloud-gazing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9d2bhh72x8wnp9d967f7kv)) > Now Kant is certainly correct that this sort of imaginative activity is often engaged by artworks, including fictional ones. Let us label this sort of creativity on the part of readers, viewers, and listeners an exercise of the exploratory imagination. However, the exploratory imagination does not exhaust the range of imaginative functions that audiences are called upon to discharge. In what follows, I chart some of these. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9dcy2q37g26svvcfzjsgtb)) > Often it seems that when we are at a loss about what to call some mental phenomenon, we resort to the notion of the imagination. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9dq4k2m2w3b86nq01y1d42)) > Kant specified what we have characterized as the exploratory imagination—the contemplative play with the artwork, searching out and testing the fitness of the various associations the work suggests. But perhaps a far more pervasive exercise of the imagination today in a culture in which we are surrounded on every side by narratives is the fictive imagination. This imaginative power is rooted in our capacity to think counterfactually. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9drqwenb2kajc61nhmzj0z)) > Surely, many a youngster survived and repro- duced because the elders of the tribe spun scary stories about what would happen if children got too close to the swamp where the crocodile ruled. This is not to say that the practice of fiction is not also adaptive, since by instilling converging imaginings and emotings among groups of people, it can encourage bonding and fellow feelings of the sort that encourage cooperative behavior. Undoubtedly, that is why we find the practice of fiction so widely distributed across humanity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9eh5n9ty5q9v0ahdtap0v2)) > On the descriptive sense of creative, a creative activity is an act of human intelligence that produces something or that brings something off or about, nota- bly something appropriate to the situation. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrch7h4g3r5r4ycbwd664gg5)) > Confronted by a fiction, we fictively imagine the explicit propositional content of the relevant sense-bearing signs. But we do not solely imagine what we are told or shown. We fill in the fiction. We may never be told that the protagonist has a left foot and a right foot. But we presume that he does. No fictioneer can describe fully everything presupposed by her fiction. The fictioneer needs the audience to supply creatively what is missing in order for the fiction to be intelligible. The audience meets this task by inducting what we may call the elaborative imagination. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9ewsecwz365fgeepyzyqnf)) > 9 Ronald Beghetto and James C. Kaufman, “Toward a Broader Conception of Creativity: A Case for ‘mini-c’ Creativity,” in Psychology of Aesthetic Creativity and the Arts, vol. 1, no. 2 (2007), pp. 73–79. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrcnn2jathv4jync3yms1smx)) > When a scene opens with Tony Soprano knock- ing on his mother’s front door, we suppose he got there by means of some kind of vehicle or on foot, and not by means of one of those transporters featured on Star Trek. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hr9f0n03kdnk48tgjj7ka1zg)) - Note: or maybe we just accept it? > “genre heuristic.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hrc274q0n6c4bezz00jaqgn8))