From “Ways of Seeing” to “Ways of Experiencing”: Paradigm Shift in Aesthetic Appreciation in the Digital Age
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64504/artsappreciation.v1i1.884Abstract
John Berger’s 1972 formulation of “Ways of Seeing” established a visual-centric analytical framework that dominated the theory of aesthetic appreciation throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. The emergence of digital technology clusters — encompassing the internet, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), AI-generated art (AIGA), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) — is now systematically restructuring the perceptual media, modes of bodily engagement, social contexts, and value-assessment mechanisms of aesthetic appreciation, propelling a shift from “seeing” through a single visual channel to a multi-sensory, interactive, and decentralized mode of “experiencing.” Drawing on Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift as an analytical scaffold, this paper examines six dimensions of transformation in aesthetic appreciation in the digital age: (1) multimodal expansion of perceptual media; (2) inversion of bodily participation from passive to active; (3) dissolution of spatiotemporal constraints and reallocation of attention; (4) democratization of social appreciation from professional elite to distributed publics; (5) migration of value authentication from institutional authorization to algorithms and blockchain; and (6) the challenge posed by human-machine co-creation to artistic subjectivity. Through analysis of paradigmatic cases — teamLab, Google Arts and Culture, and immersive Van Gogh exhibitions — this paper proposes the “experiential turn” as a conceptual tool and conducts a bilateral assessment of both its emancipatory aesthetic potential and its critical risks. The study demonstrates that digital-age aesthetic appreciation neither simply continues nor wholly overturns the traditional appreciative paradigm; rather, it retains core elements of classical aesthetics while producing, through technological mediation, novel appreciative forms with distinctive aesthetic qualities, thereby posing theoretical challenges that urgently demand engagement in contemporary arts education and critical practice.
References
References
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