ABSTRACT
Scratch a school principal or, for that matter, an experimental psychologist, and you are likely to encounter a standard view of how humans participate in the arts. From dance to drama the arts are seen as matters of emotion – arising from and stimulating feelings. Some individuals are endowed with talents in the arts, and, if so blessed, they simply wait until inspiration strikes. No realm of experience seems further away from formal schooling, from rationality, from scientific progress; how appropriate it is that the arts are listed in the newspaper as amusements and that one enters a concert hall or a museum with the same unreflective awe that one brings to church.
