Paul Crowther

The epic tale of a woman’s search for love and the meaning of life, as she battles to survive in a Victorian timeline more deadly than our own.
                  Lucy Forrest has mystical experiences of the self but these are only brought to fulfilment when she has felt tragedy and love in their very depths, and has learned the secrets of the Colt-Paterson revolver. She first comes upon these in the Falkland Isles but her situation is made all the more explosive on moving to England, where she is involved in a passionate affair that awakens her full sexual potency, and is implicated in a far-reaching political conspiracy with the most deadly outcomes.
                  After much struggle Lucy achieves self-understanding, only for her new found freedom to be challenged again and again in a climax full of ironic twists and a desperate hunt to the death where the prey at last becomes the predator.

Part I sets out the most essential features of
Husserl’s understanding of aesthetic consciousness, namely, its status as mode of valuing
grounded in the realm of sensory and/or phantasy appearance, which involves the
disinterested appreciation of such appearances. A number of comparisons and contrasts are
made with Kant’s aesthetics (with which Husserl’s has some affinity). We then move on to
discussion of the varieties of aesthetic object that Husserl identifies. Part II addresses those
arising from ‘external perception’ most notably the aesthetic consciousness of nature, and
Part III discusses the aesthetics of phantasy as such, and of the spatial arts, and of the
symbolically presented arts of literature and music. In Part IV, we address the interesting
general significance that Husserl assigns to the aesthetic and beauty, and in Conclusion, we
offer a critical review of his theory overall and a further development of one of its most
interesting points.

This an extract from my book 'The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming - How Art Forms Empower'. (Routledge 2020)

It might seem that any attempt to define storytelling will be undone by the sheer variety of its formats across different cultures. However, in order for one person to communicate with another (and to do so across language divides) there must be distinct but shared features of experience that are conceptually required in order for communication to take place. In what follows, I will define the scope of storytelling by reference to such features

This is a key Chapter from my book 'Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology as Iconology' (Routledge, 2018).Citations of it should use the published version.
     
        It may seem that art’s incorporation of material from mass culture and associated productive techniques rules out it having claim to high-art status, but this is not so. Eduardo Paolozzi's 'As Is When' series of silkscreen prints (based on Wittgenstein's life and ideas) involves compositional strategies with a profound and creative relation to philosophical ideas of the deepest kind. Through this, they show how even a popular medium such as lithography can issue in masterpieces. Indeed, one might even claim 'As Is When' to be one of the inaugurating masterpieces of the Postmodern era – created in, and shaping, the very zone of transition from the Modern.
      To establish these claims, Part 1 describes Paolozzi’s artistic development, and identifies his basic creative methods. Part 2 offers an account of Wittgensteins’s life and philosophical development. Part 3 addresses Paolozzi’s affinities with Wittgenstein’s life and ideas, and in Part 4, this is developed further through detailed analysis of the 'As Is When' series
of silkscreen prints. In Conclusion, the specific question of Paolozzi’s relation to Postmodern culture is developed in more detail.

This is the retitled Introduction to my book Theory of the Art Object (Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies, 2019). Any citations of what follows should refer to the book itself, and not this ‘trailer’ for it.
            In the book, I argue that visual artworks are not simply networks of signs that happen to be visual. Their status as made, assembled, or generated objects (i.e., their material ontology) is crucial.
            In the following Introduction I set the scene for this main argument by first discussing the material ontology of the Banksy work that shredded itself immediately after it was auctioned (at Sotheby’s in 2018), and by then considering – in detail - how vision is given its special cognitive character by virtue of the body’s relation to space-occupancy (a relation that each different visual art medium embodies in unique ways).
          If you ever wanted to know why vision is so special (and much more than a ‘scopic regime’) this discussion will explain it.
          The rest of the Theory of the Art Object book itself analyses the material ontology of pictorial drawing and painting; abstraction; sculpture, assemblage and installation art; land art, architecture, photography, and digital art. As in all my books, the discussion proceeds by discussion of concrete examples.

I analyse the way in which  Clement Greenberg treats  Modernist painting  as a process of self-critique orientated towards features unique to painting - flatness and opticality.  This uniqueness is, indeed, a conceptual truth, i.e., planar flatness  and opticality  are necessary features of painting  as an artistic medium. It is also true that  Modernist works emphasise these features more than more traditional idioms do. However, Greenberg's claim that the emphasis is the outcome  of a historical process of self-critique in Modernist painting  is entirely unsupported by  any evidence.
            As an alternative, I offer an evidence-based account, that sufficiently explains the emphasis on flatness and opticality as a side-effect of late nineteenth-responses to technology and urbanisation, and the replacement  of the artist-as-spectator, by the artist-as-creative-subject. I show this by means of a phenomenology of late nineteenth-century urban perception

This is an edited version of the Introduction to my book  Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation: The Birth of a Medium, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019.  In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Introduction: The Possibility of Art’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book .
    The discussion here justifies why digital art can be regarded as an authentically artistic mode of creation, and considers aspects of its creativity.

This is a renamed version of Chapter 1 of my book Geneses of Postmodern Art: Technology As Iconology, published by Routledge in their Advances in Art and Visual Studies series, 2019.  In the book, the chapter is entitled ‘Contingent Objects, Permanent Eclecticism’. If you wish to cite this discussion please refer to the version as presented in the book .                                               

This discussion describes how Postmodernism takes art to its logical limits. The origins of this are found in the delayed influence of Duchamp's legacy of the 'found object'. In Part 1, we discuss the emergence  of minimalism, conceptual, and performance art. In Part 2, it is shown how the legacy of the found object is made into the positive basis for artistic creation in the form of Pop Art and other tendencies that affirm the worth of mass culture. It is argued further, that effect of all the tendencies described is to exhaust the possibility of further radical innovations in art. Part 3 explores some key aspects of the permanent Postmodern eclecticism that is consequent upon this.

This is a modified version of of the Introduction to my book  The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower, Routledge, 2019.
      Starting from the nature of political art in the twentieth-century (and working with important insights from Walter Benjamin) I then argue that, in the postmodern era, political art has been systematically neutralized by the neo-liberal establishment, and that the politics of such art should now take place on a more general level – namely winning back the idea of art as an intrinsically liberating power. I defend this idea from the Left-Trumpist mindset of cultural relativism using further ideas from Theodor Adorno. This sets the scene for a larger project which is the main subject of The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming book.

We live in a time when 'Theory' has led people to be sceptical about the role of objective factors in cultural theory and communication. This little paper demolishes this scepticism with a simple argument about the necessary role of experiential constants in communication. It uses the example of aesthetic experience as a case study.

Here, I expound Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Cezanne in detail, and eventually show that – like almost all philosophers – he adapts Cezanne to the demands of his own theory rather than an understanding of the pictorial medium. In particular, he does not realize that painting transforms perception.
              In all my book, I offer a phenomenology of the visual arts which is object based; this means  generated from the ontology of the medium itself.

Philosophy as a method tries to identify – through logical analysis and phenomenological description – the conceptual basis of different modes of knowing and valuing. It is orientated towards constants in human experience, those features that enable the very possibility of knowing and valuing. However, whilst there are constants in experience, these are often realized differently, under different historical and cultural conditions. The realm of aesthetics is rich in such examples.  In the present Chapter , it will be explored in relation to the sublime and pictorial art (with a few references to other media).
                  I start from a radical adaptation and revision of theories set forth by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is then explained in detail why – despite its grounding in experiential constants - the sublime only emerges as an overt and sustained feature of aesthetic sensibility from the late eighteenth-century onwards. I then go on to consider why the sublime seems to disappear from European sensibility, only to re-emerge with great force in the postmodern era.

In this Chapter, I  raise some fundamental issues of a philosophical kind concerning knowledge and its relation to higher education.  Specifically, in Part One I outline a theory concerning the subjective conditions of knowledge and argue that these are profoundly dialogical in character.  In Part Two, I trace the ramifications of this account in relation to its institutionalisation in higher education.  In particular, I  argue that the market-orientated pressures currently exerted by government policy are not only empirically flawed, but are at odds (in moral and other ways) with the dialogical structure of knowledge itself.  I shall also consider some possible objections to my view.
Finally, in Part Three, I  argue that the dominant ‘poststructuralist’ dimensions of contemporary ‘oppositional’ thinking are actually deeply complicit with the effects of government policy.  Again, I  consider some possible objections to this view.  My conclusion holds that the independence of higher education is to be justified on the grounds of it embodying that critical autonomy which is the ultimate condition of a free society.

This is a shortened version of a longer unpublished paper which sets out ideas explored throughout my books especially Defining Art, Creating the Canon. In this version, I first draw attention to familiar features of the aesthetic judgment in general, and then identify objective criteria whereby evidence to support aesthetic judgment can be provided. I give particular emphasis to the fact that such judgments logically involve a critical comparative aspect – a feature that the existing philosophical literature has not addressed. After explaining this, I go on to consider the objective validity of aesthetic judgments concerning the arts.

One of the problems in phenomenological approaches to art, is to understand the link between the ontologies of art media and questions of value. Unfortunately, recent discussions of art’s broader cultural context have not helped in this task. There has been a widespread assumption that the historical circumstances of art’s
cultural production, its constituencies of reception, and contexts of transmission and the like, render artistic value relative to the time and place of its production.My purpose in this critical discussion, is to move beyond the
restrictions and contradictions of such relativism. I shall argue that art engages with factors that are of universal rather than relative import,and that questions of value are connected to this. In doing so, I will hope, in other words, to subvert the relativist orthodoxy by clarifying art’s reality as art.I shall do so by, in Part One, criticizing and developing one of the great inspirations for relativism, namely Derrida’s notion of différance. In Part Two, I shall use components of that concept, namely difference and iterability to indicate the basis of art’s reality qua art, the justification of canonic work, and, in the course of this, art’s legitimate claim to high-cultural status.

The bulk of this document is the Introduction to a book called 'What Drawing and Painting Really Mean: The Phenomenology of Image and Gesture' . The book  was published by Routledge in its 'Advances in Art and Visual Studies' series on 26th April 2017. IT IS NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK !
The book’s main theme is as follows.             
        There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their  making  embody unique meanings  that transform our  perception of space-time and sense of finitude. (These are even found in drawings and paintings done by computers) Such intrinsic meanings have not been addressed by art history  or visual studies hitherto. Indeed, the dominant tendency has been to reduce the visual image to models derived from literary theory. This amounts to a kind of existential mutilation of drawing and painting. Some philosophers (notably in the phenomenological tradition) have addressed the meanings of these practices more insightfully, but mainly by assimilating them to their own general philosophies rather than by offering a genuine phenomenology of what is involved in the very making of an image – pictorial or abstract.  By explaining  and developing this, our understanding of art practice can be significantly enhanced.

This discussion is the basis of Chapter 1 of my book The Aesthetics of Self-Becoming: How Art Forms Empower, Routledge, 2019. The book develops all the ideas presented below, in much greater detail.
If aesthetics is to re-establish its philosophical importance a change is needed. Instead of engaging with art mainly through the crude notion of expressive qualities, or making it speak through the voice of ‘authorities’, we need a Copernican turn. This means a re-orientation of aesthetics towards i) those experiential needs which give rise to art, ii) the way they are articulated through artistic creation, and iii) a clarification of the unique effects consequent upon this creation.             
          In the present discussion I offer an approach to all these issues. My starting point is the origin of art. This question is usually approached from an ontogenetic or phylogenetic viewpoint. However, my approach is different – centring on why human beings need to create art in the first place. This has ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications, but as expressions of a greater experiential whole - where the need for art can be seen to emerge from factors conceptually basic to self-consciousness as such.
            Part One, accordingly, outlines the horizonal basis of our experience of time and space, and then four key cognitive competences which are  necessary to this experience. Emphasis is given to the importance of the aesthetic in its narrative form, as a further necessary feature emergent from these competences. Part Two outlines how literature, music, and pictorial art engage with this narrative feature in unique ways on the basis of their distinctive individual ontologies. They transform the aesthetic narrative of experience by embodying it in a more enduring and lucid form than can be  attained at the purely experiential level. In this way, art embodies self-becoming, i.e. the developing of one’s own individuality in relation to others, and symbolic compensation for things otherwise lost in the passage of time.
    (This is a much extended and revised version of a paper on The Need for Art, and the Aesthetics of Self-Consciousness done a s a keynote address at the European Society of Aesthetics annual conference, Dublin Institute of Technology, 11th June, 2015)

As well as being published in a journal (reference given at start of paper) this piece is also included as a chapter in my book Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn (Bloomsbury, 2013). Heidegger’s paper “Art and Space”  (1969) is probably his last important philosophical writing. It is also the place where he gives his fullest discussion of a major art medium which is somewhat neglected in aesthetics, namely sculpture.
The structure of argument in “Art and Space” is cryptic and elusive even by Heidegger’s standards. The comparatively small amount of relevant literature tends to focus on the paper’s role within Heidegger’s own oeuvre (as an expression of changes in how he conceived space as a philosophical concept).  There is a certain irony in this; for Heidegger’s main thematic in the essay is not the problem of space as such, but the way in which it is overcome in the sculptural work.
This is a quite surprising position, since, by virtue of its three-dimensional character, sculpture seems to be a spatial medium, par excellence. Since Heidegger’s approach is so counter-intuitive, his argumentative strategy invites especially close scrutiny.
In this paper, therefore, I attend closely to the structure of Heidegger’s argument, with the aim of understanding, re-thinking, and then developing his most important insights (using some ideas that he himself might not have found congenial). My ultimate aim is to show the subtle, but radical points which are at issue in Heidegger’s arguments, and to put them to work in the clarification of sculpture’s key philosophical significance.

In the 1980's and 1990's, I published a number of works critically engaging with  Lyotard's linking of the Kantian sublime to  postmodernism and techno-science. (Other scholars later popularised the latter link as  the 'techno-sublime'.) In this paper, I first outline the salient features of Kant's theory of the sublime, and show how it might be revised to function independently of Kant's philosophical idealism. In the light of this revision I  then consider the connections which Lyotard makes between the Kantian sublime, the avant-garde, and the postmodern, and argue that serious difficulties accrue to Lyotard's claims. Finally, I suggest that whilst Lyotard's overall philosophical strategy is unsuccessful, his exhibition Les Immateriaux showed how the postmodern sensibility can be linked to a Kantian notion of sublimity. Many of the topics raised here are explored in more depth (and independently of Lyotard)in my 2010 OUP book, The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-Garde

The present paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of Flesh/reversibility intellectually is significantly flawed, and leads phenomenology into something of a dead-end. This is shown through the following strategy. First Merleau-Ponty’s account of originary perception and his critique of the reflective attitude are expounded. They are shown to culminate in rejection of the subject-object relation as an ontological fundamental in favour of a ‘hyper-reflective method’.
          A critique of Merleau-Ponty’s position is then offered. It argues that originary perception is not logically prior to reflective thought, and that Merleau-Ponty fails to do justice to the scope of the subject-object relation. Specifically, he overlooks the way in which the relation is the basis of our practical perceptual orientation. It is then shown how this relation actually pervades Merleau-Ponty’s own all-important ‘hyper-reflective’ alternative - the notion of ‘Flesh’.  Possible counter-arguments are considered and refuted. The need for a post-analytic phenomenology is posited.

I've renamed this from its previous title of 'Metaphysics and Theology of Pictorial Art' so as to highlight its central concern - the way in which making pictures can be seen as embodying a relation to God. Usually God is linked to art through religiously significant subject-matter, or happy clappy associations of the kind ' God is wonderful,  art is wonderful, so art must be an expression of God's wonderful nature'.  However, my approach is different. I offer detailed secular philosophical arguments as to why the very act  of making of pictures has a divine significance, and then suggest that if one also has faith, then we can see God's presence in such making.
              This essay can be found (under its original title) as Chapter 7 of my book How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine (Stanford University Press, 2015). Any citations should refer to this original published source.

The philosophy of film has developed an extensive literature since the 1980’s.  However, full justice has not been done to the aesthetic dimension of the medium. To understand why, let us start from a negative fact. It is that film is not a virtual world that we look into as we might look through a window. Rather, it is a world which draws us in - changing our perceptual perspectives by releasing them from confinement to the single lived body. But such freedom is by no means absolute – it plays-off creatively against the realist aspect of the filmic medium. What we see in the film has, indeed, some kinship with our normal embodied perception, but it is enhanced and transformed through correlation with  privileged viewing and hearing positions that are not available in our ‘normal’ perceptual mode. The aesthetic space of film is one of hyperbodiment – a belonging to the world that is based on embodiment but which exceeds its restricted viewpoint.

Part One interprets and develops Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting in terms of the relation between painting and the visible world.. Part Two then moves far beyond what Merleau-Ponty himself offers, through an account of the further significance of painting in terms of how it realizes that reciprocity of mobility and stationary frontal viewpoint which is fundamental to vision. In Part Three it is argued that painting has a deeper significance still, through its relation to the holistic core of experience.

In Part One of this discussion, I briefly consider Kant’s rather unsatisfactory introductory treatment of the Schematism. Part Two addresses  Kant’s more detailed account of transcendental schemata, and offers some important refinements to his position. I then procede, in Part Three, to develop Kant’s notion of the productive imagination in more detail, making use of a phenomenological outline of the ontogenesis of experience. Through this, it is argued that the transcendental schemata should be interpreted as  retentive and anticipatory procedures which assist the nascent categories to achieve  a basic  orientation in cognition.
          It is argued further that these procedures centre on the  productive imagination’s capacity to model possibilities of temporally successive appearance. It is only through the realization of this disposition that we can explain how concepts in general are able to apply.

In Part 1 of this paper, I offer an analysis of Kant’s arguments as presented  in the revised,  ‘B’ version of the Deduction. I will then, in Part 2, make some critical points and indicate how these might be dealt with – initially by reference to some insights from Gareth Evans. These will enable me to formulate a three stage reconstruction of Kant’s major argument, culminating in the experiential necessity of the Kantian categories. Detailed avenues of justification for this final stage will form the substance of Part 3 (again making significant use of ideas from Evans). I will then procede to a Conclusion

Humans conceptualize reality in different ways, but the very capacity to conceptualize entails reference to a stable reality -  a massive, shared cognitive stock, which semiotic approaches overlook. Reference to this cognitive stock reveals objective criteria that justify the distinction between art and visual culture on normative as well as conceptual grounds.
            Part One offers an account of the intrinsic significance of the visual image-artifact, and suggest that this aesthetic and phenomenological significance is disclosed fundamentally through its comparative relations.
          Part Two elaborates this by considering a case history, namely Griselda Pollock’s problematic interpretation of a work by Gauguin. In Part Three, the more general implications of comparative meaning is  explored through the question of syntactic unity in pictorial art. It is concluded that whilst art can be normatively distinguished from other products of visual culture, its scope is, nevertheless, rather broader than is commonly thought.

The paper  establishes a conceptual framework for the understanding of drawing and painting done with computers. It is guided by what I call Cohen’s principle – the theory that, whilst computers follow a different order of creativity from humans, this difference can, nevertheless, actually be used to extend the scope of human creativity.
                An image is drawn or painted by a computer in the fullest sense when a hardware-programme relation invents new visual forms designed explicitly to be printed out, or otherwise marked, on surfaces existing independently of the computer itself. The main varieties of this are – the interactive; the projective; and the interventionist. Such images also have correlated stylistic features namely hyper-real precisionist visual qualities, and, in other cases, performative effects (where the image draws attention to the process of generation).
              All these features are explored in relation to the work of Patrick Tresset, Harold Cohen, and Desmond Paul Henry.
              The paper appears in a new online journal Odradek  -devoted to the aesthetics of literature, new media, and cognate areas. The first few pages of the upload give details of the journal.

.  In Part One, I shall outline the horizonal experience of time and space which is basic to this core. Part Two will present four key cognitive competences which are involved in horizonal experience, and will describe the narrative core of substantial freedom that  arises from them, in rather more detail. Finally, in Part Three, I shall consider some aspects of  three especially useless disciplines (English, History, and Philosophy)  as contributors to this narrative core.

This paper criticizes contemporary approaches to artistic creativity that tend to see everything as determined by the Duchamp, and conceptual idioms of art practice. As an alternative to this western consumerist model of artistic creativity, I develop ideas from Kant and Merleau-Ponty.

I argue that the self is an aesthetic structure, and make links between this claim and Kant's aesthetics. I introduce the notion of the experiential sublime as an aspect of this. This is just the final part of the Chapter 5 (THE COHESION OF THE SELF: MOMENT, IMAGE, AND NARRATIVE ) from my book Philosophy After Postmodernism

This is a sample chapter from Defining Art, Creating the Canon - the one where I set out the normative aesthetics that is basic to the book as a whole. My arguments centre on the ontology of the image (running with some ideas from Gadamer). Then I set out the normative basis of the artwork as image, on the basis nof two axes of interpretation.
    There are no references given for the quotations. For that stuff, you have to go to the book itself.

This is a sample Chapter from my book Phenomenology of the Visual Arts . I consider the origins of architecture, its structural features and their relation to the body, and discuss the theory in relation to examples. The approach is phenomenological.

Published in Art History versus Aesthetics
(New York: Routledge, 2005) ed. James Elkins. This very short  paper argues the recent contextualist art history (and semiotic approaches) reduce the made visual artwork to a  mode of consumerism determined by western prejudices. Against this, it is argued that to make a visual image involves acting on reality in a way that changes the existing relation of subject and object of experience at all levels.This is an aesthetic transformation with transcultural significance. The approach taken here is developed in much greater detail in  Chapter 1 of my book Phenomenology of the Visual Arts. Another  book - The Transhistorical Image -develops these ideas  further still.

Stanford University Press, published in 2016. The book addresses varieties of aesthetic transcendence arising from pictorial art. Amongst other topics, it considers Ideal beauty, varieties of the sublime, and the  religious meaning of pictorial art. I attach an outline of the book.

This is a proof version of the catalogue. Much better views of text and images from the catalogue can be had at The Victorian Web (edited by George Landow) to which all the material has been uploaded.
      The link is http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/painting/awakeningbeauty/index.html
        The collection has been built and developed so as  to understand the iconological basis of Victorian art, and to utilize philosophical as well as empirical analytic methodes. (In terms of the latter, it deploys a kind of forensic iconography - made possible by the use of web resources.)
      The collection includes work by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their circle (notably drawings by Burne-Jones), the Victorian classicists, Ruskin-influenced landscapists, and masters of historical genre.
      The collection also includes work by the contemporary Slovenian artsist Mojca Oblak. She is involved in acquiring images for the collection, and for working alongside them to find ideas for her own work.

Routledge, 2003.  In this book I develop a refoundational response to scepticism about the scope of knowledge and values in a postmodern world. The first chapter has been posted in the 'Papers' section. In it, I set forth theory of culture and civilzation by adapting ideas from Norbert Elias. to defend the idea of progress. In this section, I'm posting the Contents, Introduction, and Conclusion to the book.

Oxford University Press,2007. This is a comprehensive normative aesthetics that addresses beauty, and individual art media - pictorial art, literature, and music. I have put a version of the the most important chapter (4) as an uploaded paper on this site - under the title ' The Scope and Value of the Artistic Image'

Oxford University Press, 2010.

  Instead of treating Kant's aesthetics as the problem to be solved, this book looks to develop Kant's aesthetics as a means of solving aesthetic problems. The pure aesthetic judgment, the theory of fine art, and Kant's approach to the sublime are discussed in detail, and shown to have applicability even to avant-garde modes of art

Oxford University Press, 1993 and 1996 (paperback).
                          This book separates relativism from its over-emphasized connection to contemporary society. I argue that the postmodern cultural world can be analysed in terms of a more universal standpoint which focuses on postmodernism’s continuity with tradition, whilst at the same time acknowledging what is new and distinctive about it. To carry out this task, I make use of criticism and constructive analysis. In relation to the former, for example, Chapter 1 offers sustained critique of Derrida’s inadequate understanding of meaning and subjectivity. The rest of the work builds up in this positive way by linking the creation and enjoyment of art (and other aesthetic phenomena) to constant factors in perception and self-consciousness.  I also explain the importance of the artwork’s historical significance and positioning in relation to questions of merit and value.