Aesthetics Making Meaning

Aesthetics matter because through aesthetic practices people make individual and collective meaning. Consider two different senses in which making meaning can be understood as central curricular goals of art education-one, is to engage and understand artworks through active interpretation;1 a second is to act as an artist-creating works from which the artist and others draw meaning, pleasure, and purpose. Knowledge from the discipline of aesthetics supports both the interpreter and the maker in making nuanced observations of form, imagery, metaphors, antecedent practices, related concepts, and social and political implications as well as in utilizing various strategies to construct and develop artworks.Making MeaningIn "From Work to Text," Roland Barthes (1971/1984) proposed that meaning is not made by an artist/author depositing meaning into a work through a series of signifiers that then produce a fixed meaning or true significance that must be extracted or uncovered by the reader/viewer. Instead, Barthes suggested the possibility of a "hedonistic aesthetics" in which signifiers are put into play by the artist/author (p. 174). The viewer/ reader/interpreter then plays with the "weave of signifiers," making and re-making the meaning of the artwork through active engagement (p. 171). An artwork seen in this way is rich in meaning, but the meaning is open and decentered.Terry Eagleton's (1990) influential book, The Ideohgy of the Aesthetic, continued the challenge to ahistorical, apolitical concepts of aesthetic valuing through a careful articulation of the relationship between artistic sensibilities and other cultural values, thereby broadening the subject of aesthetics to include its own uses and history. The modernist hermetic aesthetic experience is now rarely evoked by knowledgeable professionals because understanding contemporary art and theories of representation point to more complex mechanisms by which meaning is created (Hall, 1997; Harrison & Wood, 1993; Jameson, 1991; Mitchell, 2005). Today's fields of visual studies or visual culture can be seen as manifestations of aesthetics within this expanded field of signifying practices - investigating semiotic choices about how still and moving images are structured (what has traditionally been called aesthetic choices) as key generators of cultural meaning (Dikovitskaya, 2005; Elkins, 2003; Freedman, 2003; Smith-Shank, 2004).Good contemporary art education can reflect the best practices of contemporary aesthetics. Ideas such as Barthes' ludic process of meaning making or visual culture investigations that consider how subject positions are created through how persons are hailed by cultural communications are suggested by principles of interpretation developed by art educator Terry Barrett (2003, 2007). Such principles as "artworks attract multiple interpretations and it is not the goal of interpretation to arrive at single, grand, unified, composite interpretations," or "interpretations imply a worldview," and "meanings of artworks are not limited to what their artists intended them to mean" provide plain language guides to effective, sophisticated aesthetic analysis of the meanings generated by artworks (Barrett, 2003, p. 198). Such a contemporary approach to aesthetic investigation can encourage students to understand that just as meaning within artworks and other cultural productions is socially generated, their own subjective experiences - responses to and reading of cultural artifacts - are not a natural given, but rather are generated within personal and societal experiences (Keifer-Boyd & Maitland-Gholson, 2007).Meaningful MakingArt (and the aesthetic practices that make art possible) can make life meaningful. Through artworks, personal and community experience is represented, re-presented, re-shaped, and re-formed. Alice Walker, talking about the importance of art in her life, wrote, "It is, in the end the saving of lives that we writers are about . …