Lee Patrick [Johnson]

“Like so many Americans, She was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five.  [I mentally replaced 'gift shops' with Art galleries].

“The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs” -Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History.  [I find this interesting as it refers to public art, specifically monuments in Germany]

“But the most important reason for the study of aesthetics is that it affirms psychology’s commitment to the study of experience.  Dewey (1934) maintained that out experience of art was a good place to begin to the study of human experience.  Langfeld (1920) considered the experience of beaury to be one of the most ‘Useful’ and ‘fundamental’ of man’s experiences.  James (1890) discussed aesthetics alongside the religious experience.  The critic Edman (1928) proposed that exposure to the arts clarified, enriched, intensified and interpreted human experience.  Many conjectured that the creative experience of the artist may be comparable to the aesthetic experience of the observer of art (which may be extended to include the discovery of the scientist being paralleled by the insights of the problem-solver).  Thus the study of aesthetic exerience- in the way the study of art has facilitated the study of perception (Hochberg 1978)-  may assist in an understanding of experience in general.” -Excerpt regarding Aesthetic Experience from Psychology and The Arts, David O’Hare (1981).