Throughout this course, I have found Buber's theory to be the most attractive to me. It makes the most sense to me and I can appreciate the ways in which it applies to art. Buber describes experience as encountering subjects and experiencing objects. The idea that we have to acknowledge the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of another subject in order to have a reciprocal relationship with it makes perfect sense. We can't experience a rock as art until it exhibits something that relates back to ourselves. Then, the subjective experience can occur and a relationship between the art and the viewer takes place.
This happens often when I'm listening to a piece of emotional music. The notes and tones are mainly just sounds until the music evokes something in me that helps me to experience the song on a personal level. This is not just limited to lyrics I can relate to, but can be the rhythm of the beat or the increasing intensity in the melody. But once I feel an emotional connection to the sound, I get the sense that the sound has an emotion or feeling of its own which it is relating back to me. It's like the feeling is stirred within me that brings my attention to the feeling carried by the song, and then it becomes a subjective "you" rather than an "it."
Buber's theory is hard to describe in words because, as he said, once you take a step back from the experience and analyze it, you're viewing in terms of "it" again. But his theory does hold significance in the actual experience of many art forms for me, personally.
No comments:
Post a Comment