Aesthetic Experience in Light of Affective Affordances

Abstract Among the most pressing questions in aesthetics is that concerning the role of emotions in aesthetic experiences. In this article I try to provide an answer to this question by exploiting the explanatory potential of affective affordances. After analyzing emotionally charged aesthetic experiences in terms of arousal and expressive features, I account for the relationship between these two types of experiential qualities through affective affordances. Then, I suggest that, as they are sensitive to norms, affective affordances allow us to do justice to the evaluative nature of most aesthetic experiences.