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In Aesthetics and the Experience of the Arts: Towards Transformations, Maxine Greene speaks to the reader with passion and immediacy about the transformative possibilities of aesthetic encounters with works of art. For Greene, works of art are not to be passively experienced. They are to be "achieved" (Greene, 1980, p. 316). A "certain stance" (p. 316) is required of us "if the sounds and the light are to become available to consciousness" (p. 316). To take that stance of questioning and alertness, a willingness to take the time to look more deeply and to see what is to be seen is to understand what it is to "awaken to the ways in which the arts are grasped by human consciousness (p. 317)." This awakening is the means through which art becomes a force for transformation, opening the channels through which individuals are changed by an encounter with a painting or a poem.
Fully grasping a work of art often requires curiosity, patience, and a willingness to challenge oneself to extend one's perceptions beyond the comfortable and familiar. In many of her lectures and writing, Greene described the work involved in embracing and fully apprehending a painting or a symphony as "lending a work of art your life." This notion suggests a reciprocal relationship between work of art and audience as Greene writes:
In some fashion, as one attends, one lends the work one's life. Or one brings it into the world through a sometimes mysterious interpretive act in a space between oneself and the stage or the wall or the text (2001, p. 128).
The work of art is not inert, and the person interacting with the art cannot be passive. We learn to listen, to open ourselves to what the artist is telling us-this human being transmitting a message across space and time-we apprehend a version of the subject of the work that is mediated by the artist's perception and voice. By taking the time to look and look again and use language and gestures to describe what we observe, we open ourselves further to grasp the work's meaning.
This is what Greene describes as a "distinctive mode of literacy, an achieved capacity to break with ordinary ways of seeing and hearing" (p. 319)....