Aesthetic experience and aesthetic attitude

Aesthetic properties (APs) is what, if anything, all these AP properties have in common that leads us to classify them all as aesthetic and to distinguish them from other kinds of properties.

1- APs require taste on the part of the subject to pick them out, unlike properties like redness or rectangularity, which require only functioning eyesight. So, APs have an objective component. 

2- Aesthetic properties are to be analyzed in terms of the shared responses of competent subjects with particular tastes (this is what we call CONSENSUS). 

3- So, aesthetic properties is inter-subjective.

Aesthetic experience

Dewey/Beardsely: Aesthetic properties emerge from the object and the individual's own taste. When these experiences are shared we obtain consensus on aesthetic properties. This seems to explain stuff such as wine, paintings, etc.

Beardsley and Dewey talk of aesthetic experience as unified or coherent, and complete.

Eddy Zemach adds that we also experience negative aesthetic properties as well – ugliness, dreariness and so on – so their characterization is both too narrow and has the wrong logical priority between aesthetic experience and aesthetic properties.

Goldman: the difference between properties of experience caused by objective properties, and objective properties themselves. The movement from the dominant to the tonic chord in tonal music is typically experienced as expectation or tension, and its satisfaction or resolution. Although the tension is not literally in the tones but in our response to them, even a formal description of the work must note the tension.  

Zemach is nevertheless also correct in saying that we think of aesthetic properties as those which contribute to the positive or negative values of art works.

Aesthetic attitude

From the beginning the hallmark of the aesthetic attitude was held to be disinterest. This notion has been defined variously. We are to attend to the object as an object of contemplation only, to its phenomenal properties simply for the sake of perceiving them. We are to savor the perceptual experience for its own sake, instead of seeking to put it to further use in our practical affairs.

Jerome Stolnitz (1960) Aesthetic perception, by contrast, is once more disinterested. It aims at the enjoyment of the experience itself, grasping its object in isolation from other things,

Edward Bullough (1912) adds emotional detachment. To appreciate a tragic play properly, we must be sufficiently detached not to be tempted to interfere in the action ongoing on stage; to appreciate a storm at sea aesthetically, we must be detached from the fear that prompts precautionary action.

Triff: Not always. Lessing, following Aristotle speaks of emotional attachment as catharsis, and he believes is to be important, as if "we come to the tragic drama (unconsciously, if you will) as patients to be cured, relieved, restored to psychic health."

Zemach (1997) argues that an aesthetic interest in objects is simply one interest among other possible ones, and a self-centered interest at that, aiming at one’s own enjoyment.

Goldman's conclusion: Despite these criticisms, there are once again grains of truth in the traditional account of the aesthetic attitude. It remains the case that ordinary perception is absorbed in and functions in the service of practical action, which normally prompts attention only to aspects of objects insufficient for aesthetic appreciation of them.