Making Sense of the Senses : Evaluating the Sensorium in Visual Culture
The classification, discrimination, and individuation of the senses have long been a topic of discussion amongscholars in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Although the paradigm of the five sensescan be found in philosophical texts from Ancient Greece and China, the sensory categories defined differedsignificantly between the two regions. This disparity of sense perception informed the interdisciplinary fieldof sensory studies and following the sensory turn of the 1990s, led to a profusion of sense-specific subfields,especially those related to visual culture. While the invention of visual culture collapsed the hierarchy ofhigh/low art (Berger 1972; Baxandall 1972; Alpers 1983), the proliferation of visual culture studies furtherentrenches the hierarchical division of the senses (Howes 2018). This panel seeks to explore interpretationsof the sensorium in visual culture and evaluate the cultural and social connections/implications of theSenses in Art.