But, What Actually Happens When We Engage with “Art”?

In this chapter, the authors report on how they joined in the exciting project to lay the theoretical foundations describing aesthetic experiences with artwork. Their 2017 paper was a culmination of meetings, later intense collaboration in Vienna’s empirical aesthetic research group, and the convergence of the models that the authors had independently developed in the past. The joint model described here was a major development that included a pre-state incorporating schemas (working maps of the world, expectations, beliefs, cued behaviors, actions, meanings, responses, and a general idea of self) that one might bring to an art encounter and also addressed the implications of different outcomes from all engagements, with especially visual media. The authors’ general aim was to answer what, broadly speaking, could happen when individuals encounter any design or visual art.