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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ART APPRECIATION, by Bjarne Sode Funch. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 1997, 312 pp., illus., $90.00.
There are two academic disciplines that study aesthetics: one philosophical and the other psychological. The two are only vaguely aware of each other. As someone trained in philosophical aesthetics I enjoyed reading Funch's survey of different approaches to the psychology of art appreciation and would recommend it to others like me. Funch's book divides into four parts dealing, respectively, with four different psychological approaches to art appreciation: the psychophysical, the cognitive, the psychoanalytic, and the existential-phenomenological. Funch dutifully surveys the fields in the first three parts, but his true passion and originality emerge in relation to the final part.
Funch's main thesis is that there are five different types of art appreciation (aesthetic pleasure, emotional appreciation, cognitive appreciation, aesthetic fascination, and heightened awareness) and that the different schools of thought in the psychology of art deal with these different types respectively. Each type of appreciation and each theoretical approach is legitimate in its own context. Although this thesis is novel and well defended, it is not the most interesting aspect of his book. That is to be found in his own existential/phenomenological account of art appreciation. He believes that only with such an analysis can we account for the profound psychological influence that the arts have on our lives.
Preliminary chapters give useful summaries of the views of many figures in the psychology of aesthetics, including Rudolf Arnheim, Daniel Berlyne, Edward Bullough, Gustav Fechner, Howard Gardner, and Ernst Kris. My only complaint is that his overall approach to theory is ahistorical. He sometimes jumps over one hundred years...