Oh, how the concept of analytical aesthetics has been construed, confused, consumed, massaged, reworked, wrestled, swallowed and digested and spat out in so many different forms of philosophical vomit (for lack of a better word). Can it be possible that the fruits of this immeasurable labor are unclear, after so many decades of toil, if present at all? Modernity is responsible for the coining of the term aesthetic. The word served to rid the art world of beauty, so to speak, in favor of a more specific, descriptive term that explained not only the work but also the experience coupled with the viewing of the work. Richard Shusterman would probably say that the term has gotten a little out of hand, and for this reason he has attempted to nurse this so called aesthetic experience back into it's full bodied figure. In his essay the End of the Aesthetic Experience Shusterman attempts to explain how analytic aesthetics misunderstood the notion of the aesthetic experience and how this is not only relevant but important to the contemporary art world. In this essay, I will explore Shusterman's ideas concerning these concepts, and discern his validity and his theory's ability for implementation in

The second axis involved in Shusterman's mapping out of the aesthetic experience rotates upon the phenomenological vs. the semantic. The experience is again first and foremost in the explanation of the phenomenological standpoint, which questions how it felt to you, the viewer. The phenomenological viewer approaches the piece and is concerned with its subject matter, and how it may or may not relate to his or her own life. It takes the formality out of the critique in favor of a more specific, personal approach to the reading of the piece. The phenomenological viewer is the leisure reader who may happily read a romance novel sporting half-nude male models on the cover, simply for the feelings that the story has caused to surface within them as opposed to harboring concern for literary technique or the conceptual ideas behind the authorship. Or, a better example, the quintessential phenomenological viewer is he or she who reads Dickens Great Expectations and disregards the poetics and mastery of the language Dickens may exhibit, or the commentary of society or romance etc. that Dickens may have emphasized. This viewer bases their positive or negative criticism upon the personal feelings extracted from the piece. Quite contrarily enters the semantic viewer in this case, he who dissects the work with the skilled know how of a surgeon, and floridly fawns over the fabulous opinions Dickens exerts through the pages. They are concerned with the concepts behind the book primarily, the meaning of each character, setting, chapter; they are concerned with the beauty of the book secondarily. The entire idea of conceptual artwork was spawned from this school of thought.

The last section of Shusterman's outline describes the transformational aftermath of an aesthetic experience in contrast with the demarcational hindsight of a similar experience. The transformational experience is just that. The emphasis in this case is on figuratively transforming the viewer into a more conscious human being by means of a work of art. The viewer experiences the piece and is so taken by it that certain lucidity is gained; the comical lightbulb comes to mind in this situation where a work of art is actually the catalyst of epiphany. The experience, of course, does not have to be so dramatic, but becomes a simpler concept when hyperbole is used. The demarcational experience is not concerned with the transformation of a viewer into a more enlightened human being. Instead, the viewer is inclined to judge whether the art piece has the capacity to give the aesthetic experience. Rather than absorbing oneself within the so-called transformational abilities that the piece may have, the demarcational thought process involves the furthering of the definition of

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Approximate Word count = 1849
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)