Abstract

This study is set in the context of art education and emerges from public controversy about the place and merit of abstract art. The broad context of the study concerns the perceived lack of public understanding concerning abstract art. The research context of the study, and the central problem the study addresses, concerns the lack of systematic, philosophically grounded frameworks for examining and addressing the relationship of the public to abstract art. A foundational argument of the study is that art educators' ability to educate will be enhanced by having comprehensive, philosophically rigorous frameworks for exploring the phenomenon. ;The study argues that one of the reasons the educational task is so complex is that understanding the phenomenon of the general public's response to abstract art depends on insights at the fundamental level of peoples' perceptions of the nature of reality and their experience of the world, their world views. Accordingly, this study develops and applies a framework for the understanding of epistemological orientations operating in viewer responses to works of art based on Stephen Pepper's systematic and comprehensive analysis of world views in World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence and his subsequent Basis of Criticism in the Arts . The precision and scope of the framework developed in this study is examined in a demonstrative analysis of Francis Bacon's Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X . ;The analysis presented in this study is used to: demonstrate how different world views generate particular sets of responses, illustrated in the analysis of a work of art; expose the nature of the phenomenon of the public's problematic relationship with abstract art; and indicate how the framework is suggestive of educational strategies in viewing art