What does the work of art offer? Remember what we said. We are not arguing the existence of aesthetic objects or works of art. We take as a starting point that there are such things. The preceding entry has been a preliminary investigation into why the work of art needs an audience, why it needs a public. The work of art must be viewed or otherwise experienced by people. That is the sense in which we, as spectators, complete the work, make it possible for it to become what it is. There can be no work of art without an appreciative audience.

Dufrenne here says something about taste.  “The work forms taste”(61).  He does not mean that sort of taste that we are all allowed to have and decide upon.  There is a sort of tastes, where there can be many tastes, and they all have equal claim.  Taste is given by the work.  It is not me deciding, or reacting based on something in me.  It is me reacting to something in the work.  It is, of course, something in me.  But nothing that everyone doesn’t have.  It isn’t a reaction that we will ultimately go away and say, “to each his own”.  If we are in the presence of a work of art, then the work gives us a way to approach and reveal our humanity.  “Through tast, the witness raises himself to what is universal in the human, that is, to the capacity of doing justice to the aesthetic object —which is not a constitutive capacity [what is that?], but which allows the judgment of taste to become capable of universality.”(63) Again, I say, we must remember that we have before us a work of art (a possible aesthetic object) if only we can appreciate it.  In so appreciating we encounter taste, but as something given to us.  We can receive it because of something in us (humanity?).

Dufrenne makes this point in his discussion of the formation of an audience.  We go to the theater, or the symphony, or the jazz club, and we sit by ourself, but we recognize that we are part of the audience.  There is something that binds us together.  It is not our recognition of everyone as fellow participants.  We really, insofar as we are attentive, do not notice the others as such. 

This is why it is so rude to interrupt the performance.  Keith Jarrett is a performer who is well known for being very demanding of his audience.  You have to at least be quiet.  Insofar as you are not, you are not giving the work what it needs, and you are equally not receiving from the work what it can give.  Don’t make us think that you are there planning dinner, or doing anything that any one of us is not also doing right now.  The concert hall, or the club is there to allow the performance to take place.  Would it be better if we could all sit in our own private space?  I don’t think so.  Part of going to the public place to see the performance is to engage ourselves in the humanity of it.  We cannot escape. 

There are people who stay home because they cannot stand the crowds, or they can’t sit still, or they are afraid of crime or traffic.  It may well be that for most of us, most of our aesthetic experiences are private.  I have heard Tristan and Isolde more often sitting in my home.  But I know that I am not getting the whole thing, and in some sense, I tell myself, I am really preparing myself for a true aesthetic experience.  We can be ready, if ever we get a chance to be in the audience.  It would be different still, if I had never been to any public performance.  “. . . aesthetic perception calls on the spectator to realize the human within him at the same time that he recognizes the human as surrounding him in the public.”(69)