Pictorial Experience and Aesthetic Appreciation: Wollheim Reassessed and Vindicated

Notoriously, Richard Wollheim has claimed that seeing-in is a distinctive twofold perceptual experience a) that constitutes our experience of pictures and b) whose shareable entertainment on suitable perceivers’ part provides necessary and sufficient conditions for a picture’s having a certain figurative value. In this paper, first, I will focus on the question of whether Wollheim’s first claim, which obviously is a precondition of his second claim, is correct, in spite of the several critiques it received. Sympathetic critiques admit that seeing-in is the pictorial experience, yet they say that it must be cashed out in terms altogether different from Wollheim’s admittedly elusive ones, possibly by denying twofoldness a psychological reality. The unsympathetic critiques instead say that seeing-in does not provide either necessary or sufficient conditions of pictorial experience. By suitably reconceptualizing it, I will try to rescue Wollheim’s claim from both kinds of critiques. In a nutshell, seeing-in is a distinctive twofold perceptual experience only insofar as i) in its configurational fold (CF) one grasps suitably enriched design properties of the picture’s vehicle; namely, properties including the vehicle’s grouping properties, the ways for the vehicle’s elements to be arranged along a certain direction in a certain dimension; ii) this enrichment allows the recognitional fold (RF) of that experience to be the knowingly illusory seeing the vehicle as another thing, namely, the seen-in threedimensional scene. Second, I will try to show that once seeing-in is so reconceived, one may explain how is it that on its basis one may aesthetically appreciate a picture. For there are different ways of appreciating a picture depending on which design properties – the vehicle’s properties that are responsible for the fact that a certain scene is seen in the picture – are selected by means of attention while already being overall phenomenally aware of the picture’s vehicle in the CF. Such properties are either mere design properties, i.e., properties that are merely responsible for the fact that a certain threedimensional scene is seen in the picture, insofar as they present the corresponding properties that in the RF are ascribed to the protagonists of that scene. Typically, mere design properties are the vehicle’s colors and shapes. Or they are extradesign properties, i.e., properties that are also responsible for the fact that such a scene emerges in the picture, hence can be recognized in it: the vehicle’s grouping properties again. Indeed, a certain kind of pictorial appreciation depends on attentionally selecting extradesign properties, insofar as they enable one to recognize such a scene’s protagonists independently of whether they are (correctly) presented in the relevant picture. Another kind of pictorial appreciation instead depends on attentionally selecting mere design properties, insofar as their instantiation in the picture’s vehicle is intentionally produced in order to conceal their presentational role, so as to let one primarily focus on the properties ascribed (in the RF) to the scene’s protagonists that in actual fact are however presented by those mere design properties.