Co-Producing Art’s Cognitive Value

Abstract After viewing a painting, reading a novel, or seeing a film, audiences often feel that they improve their cognitive standing on the world beyond the canvas, page, or screen. To learn from art in this way, I argue, audiences must employ high degrees of epistemic autonomy and creativity, engaging in a process I call ‘insight through art’. Some have worried that insight through art uses audience achievements to explain an artwork’s cognitive and artistic value, thereby failing to properly appreciate the cognitive and artistic achievements of artists. I move against this worry by arguing that in order to learn via insight through art, audiences must collaborate with artists, sharing the labour and credit for the cognitive achievements they co-produce. I claim this co-productive outlook reveals that our appreciation of art’s cognitive and artistic value involves far more audience participation than has hitherto been realized.