ABSTRACT
Even a cursory awareness of the nature of aesthetic experience in cultures remote in time and cultural space should suffice to convince us that art has meant and most probably will mean a wide variety of things. From iconic object to public ceremony, the ancestry of art forms, large and small, is veiled. Though the functions vary at each extreme-from the individual’s solitary interaction with the qualities of a purposefully made but static object to the socially reinforced, tribal response to fluid, interactive human performances-the circumstances always include the possibility of profound immediate and long-term impact on the recipient. Meaningful aesthetic acts, of whatever sort, however, have occurred within homogeneous cultural milieus. As suggested in the preceding chapters, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain this shared base of conditioning, the common acceptance of values that fostered an unparalleled expansion of public art during the past several centuries in the West. The dominance of the museum, the theater of words, and concerted music made by hundreds for the consumption of thousands needs to be finally broken. All these forms depend upon the grand manipulation of and a subtle play within clearly mapped areas of cultural overlap. As these areas apparently enlarge, their actual depth is reduced. They become illusions lacking actual function. Art is losing its most imperative fundamental: a shared cultural base.
