Monroe C. Beardsley’s scientific contributions

... First, by seeking well-controlled manipulations of the independent variables (e.g., artistic features arrayed according to a factorial design), the laboratory experiments tend to lose track of the artistic gestalts that characterize works of art in the real world. In a situation where our reactions to artworks depend on their emergent holistic properties, an approach that relies on the conjoint analysis of main effects and lower-level feature interactions may fail to capture the gestalt-like phenomena of interest (Beardsley 1981). Second, by relying on well-established structured ratings to represent the dependent variables (e.g., semantic differential scales), the previous work on consumer esthetics has tended to embody a rather shallow view of the esthetic consumption experience. ...

Reference:

Romanticism, introspection, and the roots of experiential consumption: Morris the Epicurean