Producing novel forms, alienating familiar ones: Affinities between experimental aesthetics and art production

Talk by Winfried Menninghaus

22.05 2014
Komediebakken 9

Producing novel forms, alienating familiar ones: Affinities between experimental aesthetics and art production

In order to measure the effects special features of bodily looks and artworks have on aesthetic evaluation and emotional responses, experimental aesthetics needs to produce modified objects lacking or substantially altering the target features. This often leads to highly alienated forms and novel perspectives both on artworks and bodily looks. The talk will present some examples for the often elaborate „art“ of either producing experimental stimuli or inducing a new perspective on given images and texts in experimental aesthetics.

 

Winfried Menninghaus, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Visiting Professor at the universities of Jerusalem, Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Rice, and the EHESS Paris.

Fields of research: literature and poetics from 1750 until present with a particular focus on German Romanticism; classical rhetoric and poetics; philosophical, evolutionary and empirical aesthetics.

Selected publications: In Praise of Nonsense. Kant and Bluebeard. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. – Disgust. Theory and History of a Strong Sensation. SUNY Press, 2003. – Das Versprechen der Schönheit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. – Hälfte des Lebens. Versuch über Hölderlins Poetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. – Wozu Kunst? Ästhetik nach Darwin. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011.