Role of Art in the Construction of Personal Identity. Toward a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Self-Consciousness

Loewen looks at the ways art can preserve the self as an archived project. Does art reflect personal growth and can one’s view on it change over time? Why do people identify with particular works of art and not others? The pertinent question in this book is how art reflects the personal identity of its creator and how responses to works of art can divulge information about the audience as well. Art can also serve to memorialize the changes that the self goes through while living. He also argues that artistic expression provides a forum for our truest selves to become represented.