Teaching Aesthetics to Artists

Artists tend to be repelled by aesthetics, for a number of reasons. Many are suspicious that too much analyzing of their art will harm their creativity; it will encourage them to develop their rational ego at the expense of their creative unconscious. Or they suspect that aesthetic analysis will have no effect on them, that thinking about art in this way is simply useless. Give a group of artists a copy of the latest issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and their response is likely to be that it simply doesn’t interest them, that the issues discussed are not ones that they face as artists, and that it seems to consist mainly of academic nit-picking and hair-splitting which has little to do with the real worlds of art.