Art as Destabilizing Experience

• Art viewing experience ranges from mediation to unmediated

  • this produces discomfort

  • we may feel destabilized — no referent to compare to

  • we may feel free, free to enjoy the open-endedness of experience — the non-sticking aspect of the semiotic
    

• History of art

  • Representational art offered an implicit referent — our experiences, the subject nature itself — depictions of external reality

  • Abstract art offers non-objective reality, with no referent to ‘real objects’