Mimesis as Make-Believe Quotes

“A second advantage that limitations on appreciators’ participation may have is that of expanding the contributions the artist makes to their games. Much of what is fictional in appreciators’ games is determined by the work appreciated and by the artist responsible for it. But the artist’s role can conflict with participation. If by writing or painting in a certain way an artist is to arrange for it to be fictional in appreciators’ games that an accused murderer stands ramrod straight, defiantly, before a judge throughout his trial, the games can hardly be ones in which an appreciator can make it fictional that he badgers the accused into confessing, or helps him to escape, or disrupts the courtroom. Artists make valuable contributions to our games; we benefit from their experience, wisdom, and insight. But we must accept corresponding restrictions on our own participation.”
― Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts

“they not only recognize and comply with prescriptions to imagine but also themselves serve as reflexive props, generating by their actions and thoughts and feelings fictional truths about themselves, and imagining accordingly. Thus do appreciators immerse themselves in fictional worlds. They are carried away by the pretense, caught up in the story. Such immersion is not equally part of all appreciation, however. Sometimes appreciators participate scarcely at all. Some representations positively discourage participation, especially the psychological participation that would constitute the experience of being caught up in the story. That experience is perhaps the aim of much “romantic” art, broadly speaking, but works of certain other kinds shun it as sentimental excess, deliberately “distancing” the appreciator from the fictional world. Representations sometimes hinder even the imagining of what is fictional. In doing so they effectively undercut appreciators’ roles as reflexive props. For if one does not imagine a proposition, it is unlikely to be fictional that one knows or believes it; and if one imagines it with minimal vivacity, one is unlikely to have the experience of fictionally being concerned or upset or relieved or frightened or overjoyed by the fact that it is true.”
― Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts