Why We Weep

Peter de Bolla

• Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings by James Elkins
  Routledge, 272 pp, £14.99, October 2001, ISBN 0 415 93713 2

What are experiences of artworks like? Kant’s Critique of Judgment is relatively clear on this point: aesthetic judgments prompt what he calls an ‘agitation of the mind’. How agitated should it be? Is one kind of agitation, say frustration at not being able to understand a work, equivalent to another, say a feeling of joy or wonder? Does the absence of agitation signal something of importance in respect of the artwork, or is it merely an indication that my perceptual faculties are not tuned in? Some days I may get all choked up listening to Mahler; on others I seem to be indifferent. An answer to the question with which I began might be closer to my second response to Mahler’s music, since the most common feeling on encountering an artwork is, in actuality, nothing.