by Dwight Furrow
In debates about hedonism and the role of pleasure in life, we too often associate pleasure with passive consumption and then complain that a life devoted to passive consumption is unproductive and unserious. But this ignores the fact that the most enduring and life-sustaining pleasures are those in which we find joy in our activities and the exercise of skills and capacities. Most people find the skillful exercise of an ability to be intensely rewarding. Athletes train, musicians practice, and scholars study not only because such activities lead to beneficial outcomes but because the activity itself is satisfying.
The idea that there is a distinctive and uniquely rewarding form of pleasure generated by skillful activity is not a new idea. Aristotle argued that pleasure is the product of unimpeded activity. Since skills diminish impediments to our activity it follows that we take pleasure in skillful activity. More recently, in a research project that has now spanned several decades, the Hungarian/American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi has understood the pleasure we take in skillful activity in terms of the concept of “flow,” a state of intense immersion in and focus on a task which is intrinsically rewarding.
The pleasure we experience from skillful activity is most often associated with a performance. It is less often associated with skillful perception. However, it isn’t obvious why the exercise of perceptual skills is not similarly rewarding. If so, that has implications for how we understand the nature of aesthetic experience. When we experience pleasure from viewing a painting, are the properties of the painting generating pleasure or are we taking pleasure in our own skill at apprehending those properties? If it is the latter, the capacity of a work of art to engage the skills of the viewer may be an element in evaluating a work. One enduring question in aesthetics is why we enjoy works that are grotesque, painful to experience, or just plain difficult to understand. If part of aesthetic pleasure is the satisfaction we experience in deploying perceptual skills, that question can be answered by the way in which the work engages perceptual or interpretive skills.
The flow experience is characterized by complete concentration and absorption in a task in which goals are clear and feedback is continuous. Time seems to stand still, and active self-awareness and self-monitoring are suspended. The activity in which one is engaged seems effortless because the challenges of the task and the skills deployed to handle them are roughly equal. Athletes who report being “in the zone” are obvious examples.
In his original work, Csikszentmihalyi did not treat perceptual skills in any depth. However, in a subsequent book entitled The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter (1991) Csikszentmihalyi and co-author Rick Emery Robinson extended the analysis of flow to aesthetic experience, specifically in the appreciation of visual art. They anchor their discussion of art in a conceptual model of aesthetic experience developed by philosopher Monroe Beardsley in the late 20th Century. Beardsley argued that an aesthetic experience of visual art is characterized by several recurring themes: an intense focus on an object or attentional field, being present in the moment free from everyday concerns, a degree of emotional detachment in the recognition that the object is not real, the active deployment of cognitive skill in grasping the object which must present a challenge, and a sense of the coherence of the experience in that one’s perceptions, feelings, and ideas form an intelligible whole. Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson find in Beardsley’s model of aesthetic experience the same basic elements of the flow experience: an intrinsically rewarding, skill-based absorption in a task in which the awareness of time, the self, and effortful intentionality are suspended.
Beardsley’s model of aesthetic experience has always been controversial. I doubt that the coherence of perceptions, feelings, and ideas regarding a work of art is typical of aesthetic experiences which are often fraught with paradox. A work might be both communicable yet enigmatic, visually appealing yet grotesque in the feelings it evokes, or valued for its own sake but also because of its power to transform the self. Great works of art often produce sensations that we cannot explain or leave us conflicted about what we see or feel. However, far from inhibiting our enjoyment of a work, such paradoxes enhance our enjoyment. Thus, to the extent the concept of flow requires the absence of the kinds of conflict introduced by paradox, aesthetic experience might not easily fit as a subclass of the flow experience. I will return to this point below.
Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson do not rest their case for the structural similarities between flow and aesthetic experience entirely on Beardsley’s model. They interview and analyze questionnaires given to a variety of museum professionals—directors, curators, and educational staff—designed to elicit insight into their experiences and gain an understanding of the skills involved in aesthetic appreciation. As interpreted by the authors, this data tends to confirm their view that aesthetic experience is an intrinsically rewarding, skill based, problem-solving task that includes all the dimensions of the flow experience. Through these interviews, it is apparent that the intense focus on the field of attention and total absorption in the task is brought about by the viewer’s decoding skills rising to meet the challenges posed by a work’s aesthetic properties. Only when challenges and skills are nearly in balance do we become fully absorbed in the activity. The skill dimension is therefore central to the whole experience. As the author’s write:
It is likely that the inability to have an aesthetic response is often the result of a lack of goals in the aesthetic encounter. Most people, when confronted with a work of art, simply do not know what to do. Without a goal, a problem to solve, they remain on the outside, unable to interact with the work. They do not even know what responses to make, what emotions might be appropriate to have.
What then are the skills involved in the appreciation of visual art according to people whose jobs depend on such skills?
Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson identified four content areas that are typical of the experience of visual art. The most important is a perceptual response focusing on the formal and design properties of a work. An emotional response, a personal reaction to the emotional content of the work, was also considered necessary by most of the interviewees. Many interviewees mentioned, as central to their experience, an intellectual response that connected a work to art history, culture, and art theory. And finally, some interviewees, especially if their job involved education, mentioned a desire to connect with the artist’s life and times and communicate that connection as central to their work.In summary, visual skills, emotional sensitivity, knowledge of art, history, theory, and culture, as well as an ability to communicate an artist’s intentions are the skills required to meet challenges posed by works of art.
However, unless the interviews with museum professionals show how their skills enable them to address the paradoxes mentioned above, the identification of flow and aesthetic experience will be less than persuasive. The problem is that the flow experience requires clear goals and feedback about whether the goals are achieved. Beardsley adopts intelligibility as at least one of the goals of aesthetic experience which is achieved when perceptions, feelings, and ideas cohere. Csikszentmihalyi appears to agree. However, if paradoxes are not resolved via our perceptual or interpretive skills, then coherence and intelligibility are not achieved and one of the main conditions of flow is not satisfied.
Because our most profound aesthetic experiences are often filled with paradox, I doubt that intelligibility is always the goal of an aesthetic experience. How might we conceptualize the goal of aesthetic experience that would accommodate the importance of paradox yet support a skill-based account of aesthetic pleasure?
Paradoxes point to the fact that there is something in a work of art that is not captured by the conceptual categories we have available to us for interpreting it. Paradoxes stimulate a search for singularities bearing witness to the unassimilated. The skill involved in dealing with paradox was identified by F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote in a 1936 article in Esquire “…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
For people in the arts, the “ability to function” means using the tension between two opposed ideas to generate new ideas and new ways of seeing. Whether this is compatible with the flow experience depends on what the goal of the activity is. Because paradoxes in art are never resolved and new ways of looking at a work generate new paradoxes, the goal of art appreciation cannot be to arrive at some final word about what the work means. Our skills will never be up to that challenge.
If generating new ideas and new ways of seeing are the aims of the visual arts, the responsibility for doing so falls, not only on artists but on appreciators as well, who must develop new forms of sensibility in order to grasp innovation in the arts. If there is enjoyment in feeling the tension between incompatible ideas, it is in experiencing waves of proliferating meanings and sensations as the incompatibilities spin off in incommensurable directions. There is enjoyment to be found in such experiences but it is the enjoyment of pregnancy and creation not of closure and conclusion. I can’t claim to know but it does not strike me as obviously true that museum professionals are best positioned for such experiences given the practical constraints of their jobs. It is not surprising that neither Beardsley nor the museum professionals interviewed by Csikszentmihalyi took onboard the inexhaustibility of art and the delight it engenders.
There is “flow” to be found in this inexhaustibility but only for those willing to ride the maelstrom.