The personal nature and cultural construction of aesthetic response: A cross-cultural case study of four women

Aesthetic Response is a process of perceiving and integrating internal and external forces stimulated by encounters with artistic objects or texts. This study follows reader-response theory which developed in literature studies, applying the concept across other art forms. Using an interdisciplinary approach with research from art and aesthetics, anthropology, psychology and women's studies, I designed and employed an original qualitative method based on ethnographic description and rhetorical analysis.;My research objective was to identify the nature of aesthetic response and to explore the extent to which this process is shaped by cultural and personal constructions. Case studies of four highly-educated women in the arts representing two disparate cultures, China and America, were selected as study participants. I collected and analyzed the undirected oral responses of these four women to five different non-performance works of art and applied a "descriptive commentary" which revealed their processing paths of response, their common use of aesthetic response elements, and their own stylistic response characteristics.;Seven distinctive categories of aesthetic response elements were discovered in the analysis, concerning issues of context, emotional identification and experiential learning, and modes of thinking about the artwork. In addition, I noted in the aesthetic responses idiosyncratic elements of style for the individual women that related to organizational strategy, tone of voice and other expressive patterns.;Personal life stories correlated positively with the women's styles of aesthetic response and indicated a complex relationship between perceptions and experiences. Significant cultural patterns evident with the Chinese participants included the consistent use of a cultural context, illustrative digressions, and a thorough application of aesthetic response elements. The American participants demonstrated few similarities and more random use of aesthetic response elements, dominated by affective and subjective modes.;The findings support the concept of social constructionism but suggest, generally, that personal history mitigates the effects of culture as manifested in the process of aesthetic response, and specifically, that cultural constructions as perceptual lenses may be used more for positioning than for directing the process of understanding works of art.