Beauty on Trust: Aesthetic Testimony, Verbal Description and the Impact of the ‘Objectivity Imperative’ on the Experiences of Gallery Visitors with Visual Impairment.

Feeney, David (2025) Beauty on Trust: Aesthetic Testimony, Verbal Description and the Impact of the ‘Objectivity Imperative’ on the Experiences of Gallery Visitors with Visual Impairment. Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. British and Continental Perspectives, 1 (1). pp. 4-17. (Accepted for Publication)

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Abstract

Concern for the limits of what we can learn from one another about beauty has recurred throughout the history of aesthetic theory. Dividing its attention between literary renderings of blindness and widely endorsed regulatory features of art access initiatives, this chapter positions an exploration of what the experiences of people with visual impairment might contribute to long-standing deliberations about the appropriate weighting of the degrees of epistemological credence afforded to aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony within a history of philosophical debate from which their potentially instructive perspectives have been regrettably absent. After tracing aspects of the ‘aesthetic testimony debate’ through literary representations of blindness, the chapter shifts focus in order to contemplate potential applications of insights generated by the debate to a review of the potentially impoverishing impact of selected art access guidelines on the aesthetic experiences of gallery visitors with visual impairment. The ‘objectivity imperative’ that is a feature of established verbal description guidelines is accounted for in terms of an ill-supported and distinctly unhelpful suspicion of hermeneutics within the domain of art access. Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s delineation of the threads of mutual causation and justification that fuse experience, hermeneutics and evaluation within the ‘psychological set’ of art engagement is brought into service as a means of challenging the logic and value of the repeated instructional mantra that describers of works of visual art for gallery visitors should merely ‘say what they see’.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Visual impairment, aesthetics, testimony, verbal description
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
Depositing User:	David Feeney
Date Deposited:	18 Jul 2025 11:07
Last Modified:	18 Jul 2025 11:07
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4682

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