Soru

The passage below discusses developments in aesthetic theory. Arrange the following statements to accurately reflect the chronological sequence of rhetorical functions performed by the passage's successive paragraphs.

Mid-century aesthetic criticism was largely dominated by formalist approaches, most prominently championed by critics who evaluated artworks strictly on their internal visual properties—such as line, color, and composition. This paradigm explicitly rejected historical context, artist biography, or social function as irrelevant to aesthetic judgment. Formalism provided a rigorous, putatively objective vocabulary for art criticism, insisting that true artistic value was autonomous and resided entirely within the physical boundaries of the canvas or sculpture. By isolating the artwork from its cultural matrix, formalists sought to elevate criticism to a quasi-scientific discipline, one immune to the vicissitudes of political or sociological fashion.

The hegemony of this approach was severely destabilized by the advent of conceptual art and the proliferation of "readymades"—everyday objects exhibited as art without physical alteration. When faced with an unmodified snow shovel or a pristine porcelain urinal presented in a gallery, formalist criteria proved hopelessly inadequate; such works possessed no unique internal properties to distinguish them from their mundane counterparts. In response, philosophers articulated the Institutional Theory of Art, which posited that an object achieves the status of art not through its manifest physical qualities, but by being christened as such by the "artworld"—a network of curators, critics, and artists. Under this framework, the defining characteristic of art shifted from visual form to social conferral.

Yet, while the Institutional Theory successfully accommodated the conceptual turn in contemporary art, a growing consensus of critics argues that it suffers from a fatal explanatory deficit. By defining art entirely through sociological legitimation, institutional theorists effectively evacuate the concept of aesthetic experience altogether. If the only difference between a shipping carton in a supermarket and an identical one in a museum is the institutional context of the latter, the theory provides no normative grounds for explaining why the artworld chooses to consecrate certain objects over others. It describes the mechanics of artistic designation but remains silent on the nature of artistic engagement itself, rendering art criticism a mere exercise in institutional sociology.

Recently, a nascent group of neuroaesthetics scholars has proposed a framework that attempts to transcend this dichotomy between autonomous form and institutional context. They suggest that what the artworld actually consecrates is not the object itself, but rather its capacity to trigger specific cognitive dissonance or perceptual shifts within viewers situated in a designated contemplative space. By arguing that institutional framing serves primarily to prime the viewer's neural networks for a heightened state of aesthetic processing, this approach rehabilitates the importance of the viewer's direct experience while simultaneously acknowledging that such experience is heavily mediated by institutional cues.