art as an experience

In one of the micro-essays, titled “Miraculous cures and the canonization ofBasquiat,” Eno revisits the subject with a sentiment Greil Marcus would come to echo in his fantastic recent SVA commencement address on “high” vs. “low” art. Eno writes:

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. (Roy Ascott’s phrase.) That solves a lot of problems: we don’t have to argue whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre’s bricks or Andrew Serranos’s piss or Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ are art, because we say, ‘Art is something that happens, a process, not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen.’ … [W]hat makes a work of art ‘good’ for you is not something that is already ‘inside’ it, but something that happens inside you — so the value of the work lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art.

from brainpickings 2013