Is aesthetic perception bound with normative judgments from the first moment of the encounter with an artistic creation, or maybe this rather depends on the cultural layers surrounding the work of art?
The trouble with terms like "aesthetic" and "art" is that they can be used either in a merely descriptive sense or else in an evaluative or honorific sense. My father didn't understand abstract painting and would say "That's not art". He was using "art" in the evaluative sense. He could instead have said "That's not good art", where the term "art" by itself is merely descriptive of a category of objects. Similar things might be said about various uses of the terms "aesthetic" or "aesthetics". If an aesthetic perception simply recognizes certain formal or technical aspects of an artwork or categorizes an artwork in terms of those aspects, then the use of the adjective "aesthetic" is merely descriptive; if the experience involves not just recognition but appreciation, then the experience is evaluative. Of course quite often the appreciation immediately attends the recognition. But the two can come apart. Sometimes one doesn't know what to think on first sight. Appreciation (or depreciation) can take time.
Very interesting question. I would be inclined to answer in the affirmative for this, because I view art and artistic expression as entirely culturally embedded. In other words, an artwork has no meaning intrinsically--it's just an object. Meaning is ascribed to it through the ways people use ideas. So even to make the decision that something is a work of art is an inherent value judgment that has a normative quality to it. I would also add that the term "normative" can mean some different things depending on the discipline, so I would think that we need to define that term rather carefully.
This is, indeed, a very interesting question. In fact, currently Im dealing with this aspect due to my research about art and historical representation of otherness. During my research I found that, for example, in the artistic representations about the Caribbean and its inhabitants that was made by French and British designers and engravers during XIX century, the images were made without travelling to America, therefore, mostly all the images were made base on aesthetic conceptions from the artists following European ideas spread in schools of art. The second aspect of this is that those images were created with the intention to decorate the publications of memories of travel thorough the New World. Images not designed in site, help to build representations about the others in Europe.
Now, besides the historical point of view about aesthetic, art transmit cultural ideas.
Reception theories (reception aesthetics) give an interesting insight into this issue. See for example:
W. Kemp 1988. "The Work of Art and Its Beholder"
M.A. Holly 2002. "Reciprocity and Reception Theory"
