Book Review: The Psychology of Art Appreciation

This beautiful book richly deserves the attention of anyone interested in visual art and psychology's various attempts to explain its significance and impact upon our lives. As a richly-detailed, constructively critical yet compassionate overview of the major approaches and models within psychology that have tackled questions of aesthetics and art appreciation, it is unsurpassed. Beautifully written and even more beautifully illustrated in a fashion that does justice to the paintings under discussion, the book also serves as a treasure-trove of reference material that must surely represent many years of painstaking research.

Following a brief introduction, the text is divided into four parts, each covering a significant psychological approach to art appreciation: the psychophysical, the cognitive, the psychoanalytic and (in pioneering fashion) the existential-phenomenological. While readers of this Journal are likely to direct their attention to the final part of this book, I want to emphasise that the previous three parts are uniformly stimulating and rich in theoretical exploration and implication. For instance, my own experience of reading the first part, dealing with psycho-physical approaches was one that quickly shifted from a prejudiced attitude of disinterest and near-dismissal to one of growing fascination, involvement and intellectual challenge.

While psychoanalytic approaches are perhaps the most widely known (and influential) in their examination of the visual arts, Funch's book is careful not to allow such readings to "swamp" his book. If anything, his discussions on psychoanalytic contributions, while both accurate and attentive to the key authors and theoreticians, seem, at times, unnecessarily brief and abrupt. Knowing something about the range and scope of such analyses, I was surprised to note the lack of any reference to the work of Peter Gay whose psychoanalytically influenced, if still highly idiosyncratic, views on art appreciation continue to strike me as being highly original and worthy of at least as much attention as is given to other analytic thinkers.

But, let me return to the fourth part of the book. Funch's principal argument is that "an aesthetic experience is an instance in which an emotional quality is constituted in its existential actuality" (p 6).

Following an initial, highly useful, overview of a number of existential-phenomenological arguments that have been put forward regarding art appreciation - among which is included the pioneering work of Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson whose phenomenological research proposes important distinctions between the structure and content of aesthetic experience - Funch focuses upon what seem to him to be the three major interdependent dimensions of aesthetic experience: the visual, the emotional and the intentional. Of these, his most original contributions focus upon the emotional constituents. Such explorations allow Funch to engage in a careful, descriptive examination of those somewhat rare instances that permit an engagement (or being-) with an individual work of art from an intersubjective - rather than a more seemingly detached, "objective" standpoint. This phenomenological 'turn' further permits the author to consider the importance of the individual character and originality of any particular work of art within its own co-constituted framework rather than place it immediately, and solely, within more generalised aesthetic, cultural or thematic perspective.

Funch subsequently concludes:

At the present stage of psychological research further phenomenological investigation of the aesthetic experience is of the utmost importance. First of all to consolidate preliminary observations, to refine their conceptualization, and to uncover aspects that have not yet been observed. And secondly, to improve the phenomenological basis of the existential-phenomenological thesis.

In future studies the thesis should be further evaluated for its explanatory value within the area of art appreciation, and for its contributions to the understanding of art in the context of human existence in general. Examining the thesis's compatibility within the area of emotion theories is yet another major task to be done, with the prospect of a much needed phenomenological approach to emotions... (p 275-6).

The significance given to existential-phenomenological thought in this important, and at times even audacious, book is both laudable and far-reaching. In its exploration of the relationship between being and art it emerges as a truly pioneering text that will surely engage and inspire the reader.

Ernesto Spinelli