The Perfect Spectator: The Experience of the Art Work and Reception Aesthetics

Published with vis-à-vis.

What really happens between a spectator and a work of art at the moment of encounter? How does one experience “meaning” in a work of art? How does an interpretation of an art object come to take hold for a viewer? How can that process of interpretation, which often takes place at a subconscious level beyond language, be understood and articulated? In The Perfect Spectator, author Janneke Wesseling, Professor of Visual Arts at Leiden University in the Netherlands, addresses these questions by turning to the field of reception aesthetics, with its central premise that the contemplation of art is a matter of interaction between an active artwork and an active observer. Wesseling proceeds from her own intensely personal encounters with art objects, and her professional experience studying and writing about art, in order to arrive at a new theoretical framework for the sight and contemplation of art.