Aesthetics and Rhetoric

By Claudia Gorbman

Two terms, aesthetics and rhetoric, identify two distinct ways in which musical multimedia can be considered. Though they are certainly not opposites, they designate two kinds of discourses, and concomitant sets of assumptions, about musical multimedia. Aesthetics, of course, is the study of what is pleasing and beautiful. In its Kantian, apolitical sense, aesthetics sees the work as an object to be admired, as a gateway to the sublime, to be explored and perhaps poked and prodded for the secrets of formal beauty and meaning that it can reveal. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Considering the rhetoric of the work focuses on its manipulations of the audio-viewer, perhaps as a function of where those manipulative designs came from and how they are embedded in the work.