Everyday Aesthetics Research Articles

Experiencing Revulsion: Aesthetic Discomfort and Ordinary Life

Abstract Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative aesthetics are not mere occurrences of disgust or repulsiveness in art and in everyday life, but ways of addressing the repulsive in relation to the culturally variable scope of art and aesthetics. Besides the classical paradigm that associates repugnant subjects with their pleasure-inducing imitations in art, and the transgressions of modern and contemporary art that increasingly shocked their audience, revulsion can also be regarded as a form of displeasure linked to the quotidian, yet aesthetically relevant forms of life. By virtue of this ordinary nature, which is not unfamiliar to other (non-Western) cultures, revulsion could be placed at the core of everyday aesthetics, since it confirms both the transition from contemplation to action in recent aesthetics, that is, the practical preoccupation with the aesthetic quality of living, and the broader redefinition of aesthetics in terms of sensory reactions.

Delineating beauty: On form and the boundaries of the aesthetic

AbstractPhilosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be.

Beyond the Art Museum: A Phenomenological-Hermeneutic Account of Everyday Aesthetics

Abstract The article presents a phenomenological-hermeneutic account of everyday aesthetics based on the Playful Eye, an experiential method for encountering the “Other” through contemplative, somatic, and embodied practices informed by the concept of play. The experiences co-curated with participants—illustrated here by a Playful Eye event held in Osh, Kyrgyzstan—are grounded in an understanding of the relationship between the self and Other, cultivating a sense of inner truth that is unconcealed when the sensing agent experiences itself through being sensed. It is contended that everyday aesthetics provides a muted, fleeting experience of the Other, the seamless and ceaseless succession of the parts that constitute the totality of engagement with the world. This transformative understanding as “extended self,” also evident in many Indigenous traditions, can provide the common ground for dialogue, empathy, and compassion in contexts where conflicting values and beliefs might otherwise result in indifference or hostility.

Everyday aesthetics from an occupational perspective

ABSTRACT Mentions of aesthetic experiences tied to occupation in everyday life appear in the occupational science literature but aesthetic experiences have not been a focus of study. Building on the definition of aesthetic emotion, we draw on key conceptual sources from anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and the science of neuroaesthetics to explore everyday aesthetics from the perspective of occupation. Objects are critical to an aesthetic event and significant at an occupational, societal, and cultural level. The neurological process of object appraisal is a key source of aesthetic emotion in everyday life. We propose everyday aesthetics as a useful concept for identifying and describing aesthetic experiences that stir humans to act in ways related to occupation and social interaction. Reactions to aesthetic emotions stimulated by the appraisal of objects and events result in acts that potentially support or undermine health and well-being. Everyday aesthetic experiences are a source of motivation present in creative acts and in occupation. Aesthetic emotional processing in everyday life is an aspect of decision-making impacting pleasure, displeasure, agency, and subjective quality of life.

Aesthetic Pragmatism and Feminism of Jane Addams

This article aims to contribute to the recognition of Jane Addams' aesthetic reflections. Her reflections extended pragmatism by anticipating some themes of Dewey’s aesthetics and some of its current aesthetic derivations. Addams broke down the barriers that separated art and life with the practices at Hull House in which immigrants of different ethnicities and women had an active and leading part. She thus expanded the social meaning of some of the avant-garde art movements that influenced her, such as the Art and Crafts Movement, by trying to make aesthetic sensibility a part of the everyday life of Hull House’s neighbors. In this way, she anticipated current everyday aesthetics, but without diluting the artistic specificity. Art transfigures events through poetics, allowing us to transform our lives through the values that are the common heritage of humanity. In Addams, we find a social aesthetic that sheds light on some of the problems of contemporary theories, expands the considerations of the artistic movements of her time, and contributes to reflections on the vital importance of aesthetics.

‘A Final Solution for Humanity’? Modern Design and the Ambivalence of Redemption in Post-War West Germany

During the Third Reich, a modern shape of everyday objects was propagated as realising a German nation defined as an organic and racial entity. What happened to this cultural nexus after 1945? Historical scholarship has emphasized above all that modern design went on to be successfully framed as a cultural good that redeemed West Germany from the Nazi past. This redeeming opposition between the political meanings of modern design before and after 1945, however, appears less clear-cut if one acknowledges the structure of denial in post-war discourses by focussing on the silences, omissions and discrepancies in various publications. Such an analysis exposes how the coding of modern design as ‘timeless’ together with its promotion in the context of the Marshall Plan made it possible to blur any historical understanding of how the underlying notions of everyday aesthetics had been intertwined with racially loaded ideas of the German people. This obscurity in the context of a not yet decolonized West facilitated the continuing influence of at least some aspects of modern design’s more troubling political legacies.

A Comparative Philosophy of Sport and Art

Sport aesthetics historically has been somewhat marginalized in the philosophy of sport, which is itself a marginalized focus in philosophy—to some degree, not unlike aesthetics itself. Despite the relative neglect of how the artworld and sportworld both intersect and diverge, for the last decade or so there has been growing interest in this topic, complemented in part by theoretical advances in everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, and related areas. Recent books on sport aesthetics include Stephen Mumford’s Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (2012), which has since all but dominated discussions of aesthetics among philosophers of sport, and Andrew Edgar’s Sport and Art: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Sport (2014), which is concerned with sport and art as sources not so much of aesthetic appeal as of meaning in a broader, ‘de-aestheticized’ sense. My own book, Kinetic Beauty: The Philosophical Aesthetics of Sport (2019), follows in Mumford’s wake, where Paul Taylor’s recent book seems to occupy a similar place with respect to Edgar’s, at least in marginalizing the role of aesthetics in a narrow sense in addressing broad questions of meaning in these domains.

John Dewey's Pragmatist Aesthetics

Everyday Aesthetics, radicalizing Dewey’s notion of the continuity between art and experience, aims to find aesthetic qualities in ordinary experience. The problem is that it reduces the aesthetic significance that Dewey attributed to artistic production. Analyzing Dewey’s work and its interpreters, I will demonstrate that the continuity of ordinary experience and art is what lends art its vital and distinctive character. The work of art contributes to developing other ways of seeing and acting in the world, reinforcing life in common, the basis of democracy.

Everyday Aesthetics - Review

This article reviews the volume 'Everydayness: Contemporary Aesthetic Approaches', edited by Lisa Gombini and Adrián Kvokačka. Thomas Froy assesses the relation, explored by the contributing authors, between the notion of the 'everyday' and the field of aesthetics, focussing on questions about the 'who' and the 'what' of everyday aesthetics, and its place in the modern world.

What ugly and beautiful photographs reveal about COVID-19 lockdown experiences, everyday aesthetics and photography aesthetics.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which restricted our daily (visual) experiences, we asked people to take an ugly and beautiful photograph from within their homes. In total, 284 photographs (142 ugly and 142 beautiful) and accompanying statements were submitted and brought to light an intimate portrait of how participants were experiencing their (lockdown) home environment. Results revealed an aesthetic preference for (living) nature. Beauty and ugliness were also connected to good versus bad views, mess versus cosiness, unflattering versus flattering portraits and positive versus negative (COVID-19) emotions. In terms of photography strategies, editing and colour were important for beautiful photographs, whereas a lack of effort and sharpness showed up relatively more in ugly photographs. A follow-up study revealed that other viewers' (n=86) aesthetic judgements of the photographs were largely in line with the original submissions, and confirmed several of the themes. Overall, our study provides a unique photographic window on our everyday aesthetic experiences at home during the COVID-19 lockdown.

From museum aesthetics to everyday aesthetics: Narratives about Saigon in The Lover by Jean-Jacques Annaud and Bar Girls by Le Hoang

Saigon is an urban area that has undergone many political and historical upheavals. This study focuses on aesthetic qualities in an examination of The Lover by Jean-Jacques Annaud and Bar Girls by Le Hoang, which together contrast the image of Saigon during two different periods. I argue that Annaud presents the image of a colonial Saigon from a perspective grounded in nostalgia and memories, utilizing the techniques of museum aesthetics to juxtapose western and eastern spaces. Meanwhile, Le Hoang highlights the contemporary city of Saigon, reflecting in his film the qualities of an everyday aesthetics.

Care Aesthetics, Coronavirus and Everyday Life

The article outlines the concept of care aesthetics and then uses it to examine different responses to the coronavirus pandemic. The ambition is to provide a language and approach to everyday community-based practices that values them as caring and artistic, without necessarily determining whether they are first and foremost one or the other. The article outlines the origins of care aesthetics as a response to the field of feminist care ethics and then examines how it links to theories of the everyday and everyday aesthetics. Community responses to the pandemic are examined through this lens, to reveal the blurred boundaries between acts of care and arts-led programmes. Examples of community cooking, theatre companies transforming their venues and community arts interventions are discussed to demonstrate how attention to the sensory practices of caring solidarity might be enhanced.

Escaping the Shadow

Escaping the Shadow

Sustaining Urban Public Spaces through Everyday Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism: The Case of the Art Center Recyclart

This article explores how social artistic interventions provide forms of everyday aesthetic cosmopolitanism – an intellectual and aesthetic openness towards objects, places, experiences, activities that relates to the everyday life of people regardless of identity, occupation, social class, cultural/racial background, and lifestyle – in transforming urban voids into inclusive urban public spaces. Through socially engaged art, artists and artistic institutions do not play a leading role but act as facilitators to provide space and context for events to emerge. Through participant observations and interviews for the period 2015-2018 and using concepts of everyday aesthetic cosmopolitanism, we demonstrate how the art center Recyclart, through socially informed artistic interventions, practices, and performances, contributed to transforming urban voids into inclusive urban public spaces. Our results indicate that local life, enacted by so-called marginalized residents and their everyday practices in urban central neighborhoods, is critical in city-making and contributes to everyday aesthetic cosmopolitanism.

Knitting and Everyday Meaning-Making

Knitting has long established meanings in everyday life. As popular and academic interest in yarncraft has surged, these meanings are being re-made. Recent times have also seen a proliferation of ways to make and share meanings, and recognition of the interaction of modes and materials, and affective and aesthetic engagements involved. This article draws on interdisciplinary approaches to meaning-making to present three strands, each offering a different way of looking at the relationship between knitting and meaning-making in contemporary everyday lives. The first explores the deep-rooted connections between knitting and meaning-making activities conventionally understood as literacy. The second strand draws on Ingold’s taxonomy of lines to explore knitting as correspondence between maker and the material world. The third draws on Saito’s work on everyday aesthetics to examine how long-established meanings of knitting, in particular its associations with the “ordinary,” are entwined with newer meanings across the private and public faces of contemporary knitting practice. Entwined together, these strands demonstrate that knitting is a powerful metaphor for exploring everyday meaning-making. In addition, and significant to the recognition of previously undervalued voices and experiences, this also (re)opens ways of understanding the value of knitting as a meaning-making practice in its own right.

Aesthetics in Styles and Variation: A Fresh Flavor

Speaker attitudes, ascriptions, qualia, and other forms of overt aesthetic commentary function as constraints on language and culture and are central to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Despite the importance of aesthetics, sociolinguists studying variation and change have largely shied away from the topic. This review suggests that covert aesthetic evaluations play a role in variation and change. We draw on non-Western approaches to aesthetics ( rasa and “everyday aesthetics”) that emphasize the interplay between receiver and the aesthetic stimulus. We present two case studies. One, from fieldwork on Nkep (an Oceanic language spoken in Vanuatu), draws attention to the way aesthetic factors seem to slow language change. The other, from fieldwork on Spanish in California, shows how aesthetic evaluations of linguistic features facilitate the transfer of variation in a situation of language contact.

The ethico-aesthetics of teaching: Toward a theory of relational practice in education

This paper discusses what constitutes good teaching, taking as its cue the ‘aesthetic’ concept treated in everyday aesthetics and ‘internal good’ accounted by McIntyre. Teaching is viewed as practice, not merely as a basic action, due to its epistemological nature as everyday work. What everyday aesthetics teaches us is that even in the practice of teaching, sensory experiences such as comfort, familiarity, discomfort, ordinariness, etc. can be viewed as aesthetic experience. This kind of aesthetic experience constitute intuition supporting ’good teaching’ that confirmed by examining Dreyfus et al. This ‘good teaching’ sensitivity is not specific to the individual practitioner, but is considered to be an ‘in-practice value (internal good?)’ (McIntyre) shared by the community of practice. From the aesthetic perspective, this value could be called ‘aesthetic value in practice’. In the teaching community of practice, ‘good teaching’ is both ‘beautiful teaching’ and ‘ethically good’ teaching. Teaching should be seen as a relational practice, and for this reason, The Ethico-Aesthetics of Teaching should be constructed.

Dewey’s and Pareyson’s Aesthetics

Even though the American thinker John Dewey and the Italian Luigi Pareyson belong to two different philosophical traditions, on the aesthetic ground they show many resonances and similarities. Using Pareyson’s words, “just as it happens between people, who in particularly happy encounters […] reveal themselves to each other,” it is therefore possible to have Dewey’s aesthetics and Pareyson’s dialogue with each other, highlighting their affinities. This operation can strengthen the idea that the aesthetic experience is a way to fulfil human existence. Thus, the hermeneutic character of Pareyson’s aesthetics in combination with Deweyan pragmatist aesthetic theory not only have great importance for the artistic experience, but also considerable value for human beings’ everyday lives. Starting from some Deweyan resonances in Pareyson’s aesthetics, the discourse focuses on his aesthetics in its educational and hermeneutic significance within the dialogue between the two philosophers, coming, finally, to Dewey’s and Pareyson’s aesthetics in connection with so-called “everyday aesthetics.” Although a Deweyan influence on Pareyson is ascertained, and the similarities between them are not superficial at all, it is worth bearing in mind the different backgrounds of the two philosophers in order to accurately situate their reflections.

Approaching sustainable development goals: Inspirations from the Arts and Crafts movement to reshape production and consumption patterns

AbstractContemporary profit‐oriented development and consumption cultures have led to unsustainable behaviours and lifestyles and prevented our achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This article explores how arts and aesthetics could form a trend of thought to reshape current production and consumption patterns. I argue that the Arts and Crafts movement of 19th‐century Britain provides many clues for today's industries and societies to create sustainable values, including its defence of labour value, promotion of arts education, and pursuit of nature and honest aesthetics. This article analyses the movement's historical contexts and vital propositions and associates them with the United Nations' SDGs. The implications are multidimensional and interconnected. Firstly, developing small‐scale and customised products or services that meet customers' cultural and life experiences might extend product longevity. In addition, such manufacturing transformation requires incorporating craft ideas into various industries and techniques and forging cross‐sector collaboration to enable open innovation and employment equity. Finally, enterprises could work with public sectors and cultural institutions to promote community empowerment and everyday aesthetics, cultivating public awareness of responsible production and ethical consumption. This paper provides interdisciplinary discourse to turn arts and crafts values into tangible schemes for sustainable development.

Philosophy in a technical university: development strategies in the digital age

The relevance of research. The development of information technologies has led to a radical pace of transformation of the technological and, as a result, the socio-economic infrastructure of modern society. In these conditions, the question of a model of higher engineering education becomes especially relevant, which makes it possible to respond to new challenges associated with unpredictability in the field of employment, the formation of new information habits, and the environmental crisis. The modern professional must possess a wide range of knowledge, skills and abilities, including, but not limited to, competencies of an ethical and aesthetic nature. Purpose of the study. Revealing the role of the humanitarian component, and, first of all, the philosophy course, in the professional education of students in technical areas of training. Research methodology. The research was carried out using the methods of critical and comparative historical analysis, axiological and hermeneutic methods based on relevant foreign and domestic scientific literature. Results and discussion. It is demonstrated that a modern philosophy course should be focused not so much on the assimilation of knowledge, but on the development of the student's personality. A three-part model of the course content is proposed, implying the traditional level of knowledge of historical and philosophical material, the level of development of skills and competencies of critical thinking, argumentation and discussion, as well as the level of skills of personal development and self-care. For the content saturation of the third level, it is proposed to turn to modern philosophical and aesthetic concepts and practices, such as the somaesthetics of R. Shusterman and the everyday aesthetics of Yu. Saito. As a result, the growing importance of humanitarian disciplines in education for non-humanitarian specialties has been explicated.