Archival Program Information
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Symposium


Frontispice de l'Encyclopedie (detail) / Prevost and Cochin
 
Thursday, June 2, 2011
10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Getty Research Institute Lecture Hall
The Getty Center

Friday, June 3, 2011
10:30 a.m.–6:30 p.m.
Getty Research Institute Lecture Hall
The Getty Center




This symposium explores how Enlightenment thinking about the senses marked a turning point in the reception of art with the creation of a new aesthetic sensibility. The notion of taste is at the heart of this epistemology: taste is at once a sensory organ, a capacity for judgment, and a sensus communis (common sense). Enlightenment thinking shifted sensory knowledge from instinct to cognition, situating sensory experience at the center of one's connection to the world, to oneself, and to God. This experience is individual and collective, singular and universally shared, and neither illusory nor misleading.