Evaluating the Sensuous

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry." –John Keats

Meaning, or “content”, as it is often described, is certainly a primary dimension of artworks but it would be a mistake to consider it as the primary dimension. Whilst art is undoubtedly a realm of significations, meanings and associations it is also a realm of the sensuous: of the profound variety and variability of physical qualities and their exquisite influence upon our senses. Artworks are formed through physical engagement with the stuff of the world and this stuff gives texture, substance and colour to experience. Indeed it is impossible to conceive of experience as something divorced from its physical causes and forms. To be without our senses would be precisely to be denied experience, since experience is surely the very stuff of sense impulses triggered and stimulated by the world around us. Without it would be to exist as an entirely disembodied consciousness in the most profoundly isolated and terrifying emptiness imaginable, with nothing but our memories and thoughts for company.

An education in the arts, at its very best, seeks to sensitise students to the subtleties and nuances of process and material, to encourage and inspire a deep familiarity with the extraordinary potential of sensory experience and to instil a sensitivity to the importance of inflection and an appreciation of the pleasures of lingering with and savouring the vast spectacle of the sensuous.

Grand ideals indeed, but are students aware that these are amongst the ‘objectives’ that their education sets out to instil and where exactly are they, or their equivalents, explicitly stated? - certainly not in the Grading Criteria, Learning Outcomes or even in the benchmark statements of the Quality Assurance Agency. How then, are the sensuous qualities of artworks to be evaluated, or rather, how might the sensuous qualities of artworks be evaluated fairly and, in order to do so, might it be necessary - or even possible - to establish meaningful and applicable criteria?

“In addition to interpretation, critics almost always make judgements about the quality of the work. Such judgements are statements about the merits of what has been seen, not statements about matters of preference. Judgements, such as “I think this is a good piece of work,” can be debated. Preferences, such as “I like this painting,” are not debatable; they are matters of choice.” –Elliot Eisner

This aspect of debatability - and the scrutiny it implies - is crucial, but in order for debate to proceed the discussion must address itself to the reasons that led to any judgements made. The more consistent and widely applicable these reasons, the more they are likely to approach what we might consider to be criteria: standards or principles by which judgements are qualified. But when it comes to sensuous experience are criteria really of any use in forming opinions? Surely we simply respond instinctively to the things we like, dislike or hate; to the things and experiences that impact upon our senses and emotions?

Certainly we are primed with instinctive reactions towards various phenomena and these instinctive responses may be relatively universal but they are also relatively unsophisticated. Just as often, perhaps significantly more so, our responses are informed and conditioned by prior experience and this allows us to judge similar experiences directly and immediately without having to abstract ourselves from the immanent sensation of embodied experience. Keat’s didn’t apply criteria to his nectarine, at least, he didn’t consciously deliberate in-the-moment over the specific qualities of his experience. To have done so would have distracted him from the fullness of experience. His evaluation – if we can call it that - is retrospective and clearly seeks not simply to describe the experience but to celebrate it by inducing, as far as possible, a palpable evocation through the eloquent flow of precisely woven form.

Could we formulate criteria for the evaluation of nectarines? No doubt, and it seems likely that these criteria would probably capture much that Keats sought to distil (fruit growers and competition judges probably already use such criteria). Could we create criteria for fruit in general? Possibly, but this would pose a much more challenging task and the criteria formed would likely have little value to the individual nectarine grower.

So, what possible value could criteria have for that impossibly diverse and bizarre form of fruit known as art? And does this mean that we have no means to fairly evaluate the sensuous qualities of art? Moreover, might the relative lack of emphasis and acknowledgement of the sensuous in art school Assessment Criteria and Learning Outcomes be responsible for a growing indifference and lack of awareness of one of art’s most vital attributes?

“How should we develop students' unassessable qualities? Should we refrain from developing them because we can't measure them?” –Phil Race