When we stand before Rothko's vast color fields at the Tate Modern, what exactly are we encountering? The canvas itself—its dimensions, pigments, surface texture? Or something that emerges only in the act of looking, something that exists in the charged space between painting and perceiver?

This question has divided aesthetic theory for centuries, creating what might be called the fundamental schism in how we think about art. On one side stand the formalists, insisting that aesthetic value inheres in the artwork's intrinsic properties. On the other, phenomenologists and pragmatists who argue that art without experience is merely inert matter—that meaning lives in the encounter, not the object.

The stakes of this debate extend far beyond academic philosophy. How we answer determines everything from museum design to art education, from conservation ethics to the legitimacy of digital reproduction. It shapes whether we believe a painting can be fully understood through description alone, or whether something essential is lost without direct encounter.

Formalist criticism, reaching its apex in the writings of Clement Greenberg and his circle, located aesthetic value squarely within the artwork's material constitution. A painting's significance derived from its formal relationships: the tension between colors, the organization of pictorial space, the dialogue between surface and depth. These properties were objective, measurable, present regardless of who looked or whether anyone looked at all.

This approach offered powerful advantages. It provided apparently stable criteria for aesthetic judgment, grounding criticism in observable features rather than subjective whim. Greenberg could argue that Pollock's drip paintings represented genuine artistic achievement by pointing to their unprecedented integration of figure and ground, their assertion of the picture plane's flatness. The argument required no appeal to emotion or personal response.

The institutional art world largely adopted this framework. Museums became temples of autonomous objects, displayed in white cubes designed to eliminate contextual interference. Conservation practice focused obsessively on preserving original material—the authentic brushstroke, the original pigment—as if these physical traces contained art's essential being.

Yet formalism always struggled with inconvenient questions. If aesthetic value inheres in formal properties, why do identical prints differ in perceived significance? Why does knowing a work is a forgery change our experience, even when we cannot detect visual differences? Arthur Danto's thought experiment of indiscernible counterparts—objects that look identical but where one is art and one is not—exposed the limits of purely perceptual analysis.

Takeaway

Locating aesthetic value solely in object properties offers analytical clarity but cannot explain why context, intention, and knowledge so profoundly alter our aesthetic encounters.

John Dewey's pragmatist aesthetics offered a radical alternative. In Art as Experience, he argued that art exists not in objects but in the dynamic interactions between organisms and environments. A painting hanging in storage is not yet art—it becomes art only when someone engages with it, when the encounter produces that distinctive quality of heightened, integrated experience Dewey called aesthetic.

This reorientation has profound implications. It democratizes aesthetic experience, suggesting that any encounter—with nature, craft, or everyday objects—can achieve aesthetic significance. It also shifts critical attention from analyzing formal properties to describing experiential qualities: the rhythm of engagement, the building and releasing of tension, the sense of meaningful consummation.

Phenomenological approaches, developed by figures like Mikel Dufrenne and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, pushed further into the experiential dimension. They emphasized how artworks address us as embodied beings, how paintings engage not just vision but our whole sensorimotor apparatus. The meaning of a Giacometti sculpture emerges from our bodily sense of precarious verticality, our felt understanding of what it means to stand upright in space.

These frameworks illuminate much that formalism neglects—the temporal unfolding of aesthetic experience, the role of mood and expectation, the way different viewers legitimately find different meanings. Yet they face their own difficulties. If aesthetic value is purely experiential, how do we distinguish between profound artistic encounters and pleasurable but shallow entertainments? Does everything reduce to subjective preference?

Takeaway

Shifting focus from objects to experiences captures the dynamic, embodied nature of aesthetic engagement but risks dissolving any basis for critical judgment.

The most sophisticated contemporary aesthetics recognizes that objects and experiences are not opponents but partners in meaning-making. The artwork provides what we might call affordances—structured possibilities for engagement that constrain and enable particular kinds of experience. The viewer brings perceptual capacities, cultural knowledge, and attentional dispositions that actualize these possibilities in concrete encounters.

Consider how this integration works in practice. Rothko's paintings possess genuine material properties: specific dimensions, chromatic relationships, surface qualities. These properties afford certain experiences—contemplative absorption, peripheral vision engagement, the sensation of color breathing—that different viewers actualize differently but not arbitrarily. Someone lacking relevant visual sensitivity or cultural preparation may miss what the painting offers, but the offering remains.

This relational ontology has practical consequences. It suggests that conservation should preserve not just material authenticity but experiential fidelity—that lighting, viewing distance, and spatial context matter alongside chemical stability. It implies that criticism should describe both what artworks make available and what experiencing them feels like, moving fluidly between object analysis and phenomenological report.

Most importantly, this framework explains why artistic meaning is neither purely objective nor merely subjective. It emerges in the space between—structured by the artwork's properties, realized through the viewer's engaged perception, shaped by the cultural contexts that inform both. Art objects and art experiences are not rivals but co-constituents of aesthetic meaning.

Takeaway

Aesthetic meaning emerges relationally—structured by what artworks offer, realized through how we engage, neither reducible to object properties nor dissolved into subjective response.

The opposition between art objects and art experiences ultimately proves false—a dichotomy that dissolves under careful analysis. Neither autonomous objects floating free of perception nor pure experiences untethered to material structures adequately capture how aesthetic meaning actually works.

What we need instead is a relational understanding: artworks as structured invitations to experience, experiences as actualizations of artistic possibilities. This framework preserves the formalist insight that artworks possess genuine properties worth analyzing while honoring the phenomenological truth that meaning comes alive only in encounter.

The next time you stand before a painting, notice both dimensions simultaneously—the object's material presence and the experience arising in your engagement. The art exists precisely there, in that dynamic relation, belonging fully to neither side alone.