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7. Special focus . Works of art and artistic perperformances tend to bracketed off from ordinary life, made a separate and dramatic focus experience. In every known culture, art involves what the art theorist Ellen Dissanayake calls “making special.” A gold-curtained stage, a plinth museum, spotlights, ornate picture frames, illuminated showcases, book jackets and typography, ceremonial aspects of public concerts plays, an audience’s expensive clothes, the performer’s black tie, the presence of the czar in his royal box, even the high price of tickets: these something out of the mundane stream of experience and activity. Framing and pre sentation, however, are not the only factors that induce a sense specialness: it is in the nature of art itself to demand particular attention. Although some products with artistic value—for instance, wallpaper or mood-inducing music—can be used as background, all cultures know and appreciate special, “foregrounded” art. (Special focus and sense of occasion are also found in religious rites, the pomp of royal political speeches and rallies, advertising, and sporting events. Any isolable episode that can be said to possess a recognizable “theatrical” element shares something in common, however, with almost all This would apply to such disparate experiences as presidential inaugurations, World Series games, or roller coaster rides.)

8. Expressive individuality. The potential to express individual personality is generally latent in art practices, whether or not it is fully achieved. Where a productive activity has a defined output, like double-entry bookkeeping or filling teeth, there is little room and no demand individual expression. Where what counts as achievement in a productive activity is vague and open-ended, as in the arts, the demand expressive individuality seems inevitably to arise. Even in cultures that produce what might seem to outsiders to be less personalized arts, individuality, as opposed to competent execution, can be a focus of attention evaluation. The claim that artistic individuality is a Western construct not found in non-Western and tribal cultures has been widely and is certainly false. In New Guinea, for example, traditional carvings were unsigned. This is hardly surprising in a nonliterate culture small settlements where social interactions are largely face-to-face: everyone knows who the most esteemed and talented carvers are, knows their works without marks of authorship. Individual talent expressive personality is respected in New Guinea as elsewhere. (Any activity with a creative component—everyday speech, lecturing, home hospitality, laying out the company newsletter—opens the possibility for expressive individuality. The general interest in individuality ordinary life seems less about the contemplation of expression than about knowing the quality of mind that produced the expression.)

9. Emotional saturation. In varying degrees, the experience of works the emotions provoked or incited by the represented content of art— pathos of a scene portrayed in a painting, a comic sequence in a play, vision of death in a poem. These are the normal emotions of life, and such are the subject of cross-cultural psychological research outside aesthetics (one taxonomy currently used in empirical psychology names seven basic emotion types: fear, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, surprise). There is a second, alternative sense, however, in which emotions encountered in art: works of art can be pervaded by a distinct emotional flavor or tone that is different from emotions caused by represented content. This second kind of embodied or expressed emotion is connected the first but not necessarily governed by it. It is the emotional tone might feel in a Chekhov story or a Brahms symphony. It is not generic, type of emotion, but usually described as unique to the work—the work’s emotional contour, its emotional perspective, to cite two common meta phors.