Gridding a Grid: An Artist Reviews and Comprehends his Own Exhibition

The empirical study of appreciators' psychological processes includes the examination of self-generated aesthetic schemas and meanings. If the individual voice and vision of the artist has often been missing from much of the previous literature and discussion of aesthetic response, non-empirical art critics may have promoted their own voices and positions instead by using the recondite and all but impenetrable metalanguage of criticism. As a counterexample from numerical phenomenological methodology, Kelly's psychology of personal constructs and its Repertory grid technique [1] are shown helping an artist-spectator to recover and to reflect on his own responses to one of his exhibitions. Shaw's interactive and multivariate FOCUS technique enables the grid to serve these ideographic purposes [2].