From Classic to Extra-classic: An Essay in the Audience Status in Dominic McIver lopes’s Approach

Dominic Lopes is a leading figure in art theorizing, especially as to pictorial arts, as well as nonart pictures, who sometimes directly theorizes about pictures, other times structuring theoretical frameworks applicable to pictures as well as other items. One can think that he’s fond of the audience rather than the creator of a picture, and as to this, one isn’t wide of truth so much. Fairly the only dispute wherein he sees the creator in due terms is where he’s speaking of photographic pictures. We can think of a structural model in which all of his picture-oriented theories can be encapsulated, consistent, and make sense. We speculate that such a sui generis model can be extracted, the whole writing of his being surveyed, and it can be said that the audience is its dominant character who plays a significant role in characterizing the other pictorial agents present in the pictorial practices the agents living in which compromise on some aesthetic profile which in itself characterize the whole such and such practice in dispute. For all that, the present essay hones in on two facets of a multifaceted beast named audience called classic and extra-classic audiences. Having tilted at perceptual, recognitional, and modal aspects of appreciation, we’d define how seeing the subject in the picture-a process which Lopes following Wollheim calls seeing-in- can be the basis of audience appreciation upon which are built the other stages of appreciation. Lopesian seeing-in is a more flexible, diverse, spectral appreciative process relative to Wollheimian one, though. Anyway, seeing-in being the basic characteristic of both the classic and extra-classic encounters is defined regarding an audience encountered with representational, figurative, non-abstract pictures which their being art is a contingent fact. Recognition, the other basic property of classic and also extra-classic, is explainable with an eye to seeing-in, and in our terms is realized by a phenomenon called four-layer seeing including the picture surface, the picture design, the depicted subject, and the real subject. With regard to the pictorial meaning for the audience, one can say that the final meaning is a possible, nonpositive one found by the audience speculating with a possible consideration of the creator's intentions. In fine, the spectrum of classic encounter shades into the extra-classic one with a gentle slope and more and more appreciative elements being burdened on perceptual ones. This shading includes more complex interpretive, emotional, evaluative, epistemic, moral, and especially aesthetic, empirical elements-all of which present at the extra-classic level with a more punch-being saddled on modalities. Putting the point another way, the extra-classic audience in comparison to its classic counterpart has a more emphatic eye, reacts more emotionally to picture, is more affected by seeing-in, and more importantly experiences some intellectual evaluative interactions their ingredients being aesthetic, moral, and epistemic ones. Moreover, the extra-classic audience can be sensate-sensible, and perch on the brink of pictorial systems, then being converted to a systemic, pictorial agent. She’s fully aware of her pictorial experience, thence a selective audience as to aforesaid conversion.