“Inte­resting” in the Aesthetic Landscape of the City

Abstract

The article examines the aesthetic category of “interesting” as a dominant of urban environment development. The authors try to comprehend this category from the point of view of cultural know­ledge. The article includes a theoretical section, where, basing on well-known concepts, the authors outline the principles of embedding the “interesting”, as something aesthetics and artistic, in the postmo­dern fabric of modern megacities. The analytical part of the article is based on specific examples represen­ted by urban cultural landscapes, by the post­modern clash of art and non-art in urban space, by event communications and other forms of urban culture representation. The study resulted in designation of one of the main problems of modern cities: as a result of their excessive saturation with “interesting”, there can be observed a gro­wing cultural and aesthetic insensitivity to the “inte­resting” among their citizens.From the methodological point of view, the study revealed that, in interpretation of modern phenomena of socio-cultural reality, it is not enough to proceed from the basic principles of a particular science. So, the interdisciplinary approach, as a methodolo­gical resource in demand today, allows revealing, by the example of the concept of “inte­resting”, the interconnection and interdependence of the methodological approaches of aesthetics and culturology for stu­dying the cultural environment of modern cities.The authors analyze the “interesting” as an instrument of influencing on the cultural environment of the city and the perception of its text. As a result, the “interesting” intensifies the nonlinearity and fractality of urban space. On the example of Russian ci­ties development, the article reveals that the formation of a new cultural environment is always connected not only with changing of artistic design solutions or/and aesthetics trends. The authors prove that the need for “interesting” widens the frames of the subject field of aesthetics. The “interesting” is moving to the cen­ter of interdisciplinary cultural studies.