Abstract

There are certain ways in which the spectator's response to a work of art is liable to interference or a potentially deflecting kind of persuasion. What one is told is there in the work, or relevant in it, may play such a role; and so may what one supposes to be there, as opposed to what actually is. Since similar problems apply in the perception of the real world, including the people and the actions in it, to say this is not yet to say that there is, or should be, a pure and untrammeled kind of perception that one aims at or learns to use in front of works of art; that being already a form of critical theorizing which places some kinds of limits or ideal construction on what is permissible in the form of a response. But there are in fact two distinct realms in which perception and related cognitive processes occur, one artistic, the other nonartistic. For the present purposes, rather than any larger presupposition being entertained here, it is assumed simply that, differences of situation and context notwithstanding, there is no type of statement concerning the perception of a work of art which does not have a parallel or equivalent in the perception of the real world. Such is the philosophical basis for the line of inquiry to be followed here. Mark Roskill is the author of a book-length interpretation of cubism, from which the present essay has been adapted. The author of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle, What is Art History?, and a book on photography, he teaches courses in the history of modern art and in critical theory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has contributed "A Reply to John Reichert and Stanley Fish" to the Winter 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry