Francis Alÿs The Ambassador 2001 © Francis Alÿs

In “The Art Question”, Nigel Warburton’s admirably lucid exploration traces the philosophical quest to define art through formalism, expressionism, Wittgensteinian family resemblance, and institutional theory. He concludes, quite reasonably, that art resists simple definition—that there is no single, all-encompassing answer to “What is art?”

But what if the very persistence of this question reveals something more fundamental than the failure of definition? What if our compulsion to ask “Is this art?” points to a basic perceptual mechanism that philosophy of art has yet to recognise?

The Perceptual Foundation Beneath Aesthetic Theory

While Warburton’s analysis thoroughly examines what we call art and how we justify those designations, it doesn’t address why we experience certain objects as possessing an ineffable quality that demands such categorisation in the first place. Whether confronting Bell’s “significant form”, Collingwood’s “emotional expression”, or Dickie’s institutional validation, we’re still left wondering: what creates that initial sense of extraordinary significance that makes us pause before a canvas, sculpture, or conceptual work and feel that something deeply ‘special’ is happening?

This is where hagioptasia theory may offer a useful missing piece. Hagioptasia (meaning ‘holy vision’) is a perceptual tendency through which certain places, people, objects, memories, or ideas can appear to be charged with extraordinary significance. The resulting experience feels as though the significance belongs to the thing itself rather than emerging from the interaction between observer and object (Johnson & Laidler, 2020).

Beyond the Institutional Frame

Institutional theory suggests that art becomes art through the sanction of the artworld—curators, critics, galleries, and academia. But this explanation, while sociologically accurate, sidesteps the psychological mystery: why do these institutions have the power to transform our perception in the first place?

Hagioptasia provides an explanation. Museums function as modern temples precisely because they can activate our innate tendency to perceive profound ‘specialness’ in contextually framed objects. The hushed reverence, the careful lighting, the authoritative labels—these aren’t merely social conventions but sophisticated exploitations of a deep perceptual bias. The institutional framework works because it triggers hagioptasia, not the other way around.

The Peacock Paradox Resolved

Warburton’s opening example of Francis Alÿs sending a live peacock to the Venice Biennale crystallises a familiar modern dilemma: we find ourselves asking “Is this art?” because we sense that something significant is meant to be happening, even when it is difficult to say precisely what justifies that sense.

Hagioptasia theory suggests that cases like this may be best understood at the level of experience rather than classification. The peacock may acquire its significance through a combination of factors — including institutional framing, cultural expectation, novelty, symbolism, and the perceptual qualities of the encounter itself. Whatever the precise mix of influences, what requires explanation is the shared experience of heightened significance that can arise in such contexts. Hagioptasia names this psychological process; the way certain situations come to feel unusually charged with meaning or “specialness”, regardless of how that meaning is ultimately interpreted or justified.

Why Definitions Fail—And Why That’s Illuminating

Warburton’s conclusion that art resists definition isn’t a failure of philosophical inquiry—it’s a profound insight into human psychology. Art may resist simple definition because aesthetic experience depends not only on properties of objects but also on psychological processes through which significance is perceived. Hagioptasia may be one such process.

This explains why aesthetic theories consistently break down when confronted with edge cases. Formalism may be incomplete if hagioptasia can also be triggered by contextual framing as well as formal properties. Expressionism stumbles because we can perceive profound significance in works that express nothing. Even institutional theory reaches its limits because the institutions themselves depend on our psychological susceptibility to perceive specialness.

The Democratic Implication

Perhaps most importantly, recognising hagioptasia democratises aesthetic experience in a way that resolves the tension between expert authority and personal response. When Warburton notes that art cannot be generalised, he’s pointing toward something even more radical: if aesthetic significance emerges from our individual perceptual biographies rather than objective properties, then each person’s experience of art is equally valid.

The factory worker who sees only industrial machinery in Mike Nelson’s sculptures rather than profound commentary on Britain’s industrial past isn’t missing something—their response reflects a different set of hagioptasic triggers, shaped by their lived experience.

A New Framework for Old Questions

Hagioptasia theory doesn’t diminish art—it explains its power. Understanding that our sense of deep aesthetic ‘specialness’ emerges from evolved perceptual mechanisms doesn’t make the experience less real or meaningful. Instead, it provides a framework for navigating aesthetic experience more skillfully, helping us to analyse how different forms of framing shape perceived significance.

The question “What is art?” may indeed resist simple answers—but perhaps that’s because we’ve been asking the wrong question. The deeper inquiry might be: “Why do we perceive such extraordinary specialness?” Once we understand that, the art question becomes not a philosophical puzzle to solve, but a human capacity to celebrate and cultivate wisely.

The Romans called it numen—the sense of divine presence in temples, leaders, and sacred places. We can now understand it as hagioptasia—the perceptual mechanism that transforms ordinary objects into the extraordinary through human attention. Art isn’t what we call certain objects, but is perhaps our most contrived cultural method for evoking that deep, ineffable sense of specialness.

Original article here: https://hagioptasia.wordpress.com/2025/07/10/the-missing-piece-in-nigel-warburtons-art-question-a-response/

References

Johnson, J. A., & Laidler, D. (2020). Measuring hagioptasia: A case study in theory-testing through Internet-based personality scale development. Personality and Individual Differences, 159, 109919.

Laidler, D. (2025). Hagioptasia: Convergent Evidence for a Unified Construct of Perceived Specialness. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17474804

Vessel, E. A., Starr, G. G., & Rubin, N. (2012). The brain on art: Intense aesthetic experience activates the default mode network. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6, 66.

Warburton, N. (2003). The Art Question. Routledge.

Zink, C. F., et al. (2008). Know your place: Neural processing of social hierarchy in humans. Neuroscience, 28(16), 4114–4120.

>Have you ever stood in a gallery, quietly contemplating a pile of industrial debris, a looping video, or a single sentence glowing on a wall, and felt a quiet, uneasy uncertainty?

Not anger or outright dismissal, but the distinct impression that something important was supposed to be happening — that significance lingered just out of reach.

Then, days or weeks later, an ordinary moment stops you cold: warm evening light slanting through a window, the lonely sound of a distant train horn, the smell of rain on hot concrete, or a half-forgotten song drifting from another room. Suddenly the everyday world feels strangely luminous, weighted with a meaning that exceeds any obvious explanation.

We treat these as entirely separate experiences — one “art”, the other “everyday life”. But the sensation is remarkably similar: a moment when reality seems to overflow its own boundaries.