Art, Prediction and Cultural Distance
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | In recent years, predictive processing has increasingly been used as a framework for explaining the mechanisms underlying aesthetic experience and art appreciation. In earlier work, I argue that predictive processing best explains the mechanisms involved in cognizing art in categories, positive appraisal, and appreciative failure (Mortu, 2023). To appreciate art aesthetically is to engage our predictive systems so as to correct predictive failure that may arise at different levels in the processing hierarchy of information that we receive from art forms. We do so by relying on internalized art-historical priors, which provide the basis for cognizing art forms in categories. In this paper I aim to extend my proposal to cases of aesthetic appreciation of artifacts from remote cultures, where we lack appropriate categories upon which to build our expectations. One of the objections raised to the prediction processing model and its variants is precisely that it may be applied too widely, failing to explain the specificity of cultural “normativities” (Veissiere et al., 2020) and expectations that go along with shared norms. Nevertheless, I aim to show that the predictive processing model can help us understand differences in appreciation of art forms across cultural domains. I argue that in these situations we cannot build our aesthetic responses on preestablished sets of expectations (or on art categories prescribing these), because in most cases we lack access to “local ontologies” (Ramstead et al., 2016) informing the production of these artifacts. However, we can still retrieve some generic aesthetic values even as outliers; there is something that we might still be getting right due to shared routes to human knowledge. I illustrate my proposal with schematized art forms in what is called the Mimi elementary style (Ucko, 1977), from the Arnhem Land, northern Australia. |
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