Affect and its relationship with the aesthetic values of contemporary art

The viewer's involuntary instantaneous reactions to artworks such as surprise, excitement, smile, fright, anguish, embarrassment, and distress determine the quality of the aesthetic pleasure they receive from the work. These reactions, triggered by the aesthetic stimulation of works of art, result from affects that express the pleasure or displeasure felt in the viewer's body. The more aesthetically powerful the expression of a work of art, the greater the intensity of the affects it evokes, adding an emotional dimension to the viewer's aesthetic experience. The polyphony in the aesthetic expressions of contemporary artworks offers a significant diversity for the viewer's affective experience. Aesthetic values such as beautiful, ugly, disgusting, funny, cute, uncanny, humor, sublime, grotesque, and tragic, are related to subjective and cultural dynamics that diversify the sensations experienced by contemporary artworks, each of which is a composition of sensations, allow for aesthetic experiences that transcend the objectivity of the artwork and enrich the personal meaning of the world perceived by the viewer. The origin of affect is strongly linked to memory records, which build neural connections between past and present experiences. Memory determines the content of personal meaning and emotional experience, shaped from infancy onward. Therefore, as in every perceptual experience, memory also influences the emotions that emerge in aesthetic experience. The current thesis focuses on the affective effects that the aesthetic values of three-dimensional works, including contemporary examples of sculpture, make the viewer feel. The reasons for the viewer's affect towards contemporary artworks are discussed through memory and self-development, and tried to be explained through unconscious mechanisms shaped in the archaic times of childhood that the viewer cannot remember. Keywords: Contemporary art, Audience, Aesthetic value, Affect, Sculpture.