"Tell Us What You Know:" Exploring the Nature of Knowledge About Aesthetic Experience

The role of art museum educators is to facilitate the viewer's aesthetic experience and to support the integration of new concepts into the viewer's pre-existing cognitive structure. Ideally, art museum educators teach viewers how to participate actively in the aesthetic experience. This seemingly straightforward task is difficult to accomplish. The modernist structures of the art world tend to cast the viewer in a passive role. Research into aesthetic experience conducted within Modernist paradigms tends to perpetuate the passive interaction of viewer and artwork. In this paper, I examine the work of researchers and artists who stretch or redefine the modern paradigm of art and identify ways in which active viewer participation can be supported. I propose that researchers of aesthetic experience can no longer approach viewers as subjects for their studies. I demonstrate that viewers are involved in research when their voices are heard in the discourse and they have the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the work of art. Within this new paradigm, viewers and researchers become co-creators of knowledge about aesthetic experience. Knowledge generated in this way enables art museum educators to support active participation in aesthetic experience.