The analytical approach in the art world is established in the naming systems; it has become a form of classification that has gained weight and which serves as a reference in the context of the artistic judgement of initiates. This current of thinking was initiated by Wittgenstein, and others have since taken it up.

To introduce the subject and summarise the situation, the analytical approach seeks to destroy the sensory dimension of a work of art, maintaining that our senses offer only a reading at a first level. It considers that art has no essence. This leads those who implement this approach to consider that the meaning of a work of art can only be understood by intermediaries, that is to say, themselves. Thus, these players set themselves up as the only link between the public and the work: this explains how these intermediaries perpetuate their jobs.

The problem with this social elaboration in the art world is that it operates at the expense of public interest, but also of art since it freezes it. The analytical approach in art reduces the scope of artworks, even though the work of art is a malleable, flexible medium: we reinvent the artwork we look at over time.

What Marc-Alain Ouaknin says in Lire aux éclats, éloge de la caresse should be applied to art too, which opposes taking possession or controlling, and allows us to evolve. That is why, from Antiquity to the present day, art has been the subject of never-ending reflections. As Vassily Kandinsky¹ put it, “art enables you to rise”.

For Nobel Prize laureate Eric Kandel,² in Reductionism in Art and Brain Science – Bridging the Two Cultures, art modulates our neurones and it is the cognitive activity of the observer that enables this to happen.

Cognitive activity is the measure of the production of grey matter and of our spiritual elevation. The study by Oliver Sacks, the British doctor, neurologist and writer, “The effects of music on the brain”, presents an MRI which measures the effects of music on the public.³ It shows that if the listener is not sensitive to the music he is listening to, music creates hardly any cognitive activity. However, if the listener likes the music he is listening to, there are many areas that activate. If the viewer is not receptive to the observed work of art, it will have no effect on him. The scientific data seem to agree, because they imply that an approach that denies the sensitive in art also negates the activity of the brain, insofar as it will then develop only in a very reduced way. On the other hand, artworks that appeal to our senses have the power to immerse us and create an aesthetic and cognitive activity.

In his ten-year research on the brain and art,⁴ Helmut Leder explains that the viewer may find criticism of a work pertinent, but that this will not affect his aesthetic judgment.

On the other hand, in his article entitled “L’esprit est modelé par le corps”,⁵ the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrates to what extent the body is inseparable from the brain, and how the latter is able to determine our aesthetic judgment, sometimes without filters.

In other words, to deny the sensory dimension of a work – and even its essence – is like amputating one’s limbs before playing a game of basketball.

Guillaume Bottazzi

¹ Vassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911.

² Eric Kandel was the 2000 Nobel prizewinner of physiology or medicine.

³ Oliver Sacks, The Effects of Music on the Brain – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUT9UTVrwp8&list=PL8FKI9WbQ5tR6S00K4n5Lwn7IgbFLapst

⁴ Helmut Leder and Marcos Nadal, Ten years of a model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments : The aesthetic episode – Developments and challenges in empirical aesthetics, 2014.                                                          

⁵ Antonio Damasio, La Recherche, n° 368.

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