Shaunna Smith ARED 7315 Talking Points 3-21-11 Zen (Ch an) and Aesthetic Education Dissanayake (1992)

reference: maintains that the arts have always existed in human surroundings in modes of utility used for living, social, or religious functions. According to Dissanayake, human beings possess a naturally aesthetic tendency to make things special or extraordinary. The arts thus originate from humans instinct to create with special care and involvement. Her view mirrors the perspective of Zen that the arts are an integral part of human life, embedded with human emotional, material, and spiritual attachments. This reference really speaks to me because I am very interested in the human desire to make. Throughout history humans have had an intrinsic desire to make. Whether it was an eagerness to make symbolic messages to communicate ideas as seen in prehistoric cave paintings in France or an aspiration to make buildings that kiss the sky as seen in the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, humans consistently desire to make tangible representations of their ideas. Through Zen, this ability has richer meaning and a sense of purpose beyond the object itself, but also has a sense of experience involved in the making of the object. Zen implies that the aesthetic experience is an everyday experience, which occurs when one naturally engages in an ordinary event aesthetically. I think the context within which experiences take place add to the richness of an object, especially in the everyday. My husband, an amateur photographer, has a tendency to want to discard a photo simply because the white balance is not right or the image is too blurry. I struggle in attempting to explain why the photo is still beautiful to me the background story of the photograph makes it a much more involved experience (how it was blurred because he lost his balance or just happened to press the shutter a millisecond too soon). This makes the viewer consider the holistic human experience involved in taking the image or makes the viewer take a moment to relive the what the subjects in the photograph are doing that is what makes it worthy of keeping.