Everyday Aesthetics Research Articles

Everyday Aesthetics in the Dialogue of Chinese and Western Aesthetic Sensibilities

The paper examines the intercultural dimension of everyday aesthetics which was promoted by one of its most important Chinese proponents Liu Yuedi as a search for dialogue between various aesthetic traditions, in particular, those from the East and West. The aim of the paper is to explore some parallels between the traditional Chinese and contemporary Western aesthetic sensibilities, by looking for their common values and concepts which are gaining prominence in the discourse of everyday aesthetics. It begins with a survey of the contributions of Chinese and Western scholars; the survey concerns the relevance of Chinese (Confucian and Daoist) traditional aesthetics for everyday aesthetics, and examines particular features of the nature of perception in everyday aesthetics which is common to Chinese and Western artistic activities, aesthetic discourses and their conceptualizations. In the second section I discuss the “intercultural” concept of atmosphere as the de-personalized or “transpersonal”/intersubjective, vague and all-inclusive experience of the situational mood and environmental wholeness. I explore and compare the reflection of its characteristics in Western scholarship and Chinese aesthetics, especially in regard to the aural perception and sonic sensibility. The final section provides a comparative analysis of few examples of the integration of music into the environmental or everyday surrounding—in Daoist philosophy and Chinese everyday aesthetics, and Western avant-garde art (precisely, musical composition by John Cage 4’33). The analysis is concentrated on the perception of music in relation to the experience of atmosphere and everyday aesthetics, as they were defined in the previous sections. The paper challenges the “newness” of everyday aesthetics, especially if it is viewed from the intercultural perspective, and proposes the separation of its discourses into the investigation of its past and present.

“BEING-IN-THE-CITY EXPERIENCE AS A SUBJECT OF AESTHETICS OF THE EVERYDAY”

The article is devoted to the consideration of theoretical methodological foundations and practical manifestations of the being-in-the-city experience as a key element of the subject field of such branch of modern aesthetics as the aesthetics of the everyday. The article defines and analyzes the subject field of modern studies of everyday aesthetics aesthetics of the everyday; defining the specific transformation of the concept of aesthetic experience in the context of studies of aesthetics of the everyday; defining of the aesthetics of urbanism as a research direction of the aesthetics of the everyday and being-in-the-city experience as the main subject of this research (according to the ideas of A. Berleant); studies of aesthetics of urbanism, in particular the issues most relevant within the aesthetic studies of the being-in-the-city experience of contemporary Ukrainian city dwellers and tourists. Aesthetics of everyday life is one of the most relevant areas of modern aesthetic research within exploring the everyday experience of human in the variety of its scale and value modes (industrial and rural landscapes, public and personal, large and small locations, places, practices, experience of sports and food; gardening, landscape and object design, architecture, works of art, artistic practices and institutions. The main task of aesthetics of urbanism (urban aesthetics) is the focus on the city-wide environment, exploring the concept of the city in the context of human experience in all its diversity, involving both positive and negative factors. Experience in the city is a fundamental element of the subject field of aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of urbanism for the analysis of urban space as forming human, and human as transforming urban space within a complex aesthetic evaluation process. The problems of urban aesthetics are gaining ground in such subject areas as the study of human and nature interaction, urban landscape and its negative aspects, public art and art practices as a way of forming the collective aesthetical and ethical values.

Artyfikacja codzienności i odwrócony mimetyzm, czyli życie, które naśladuje sztukę

In this paper, I analyse the phenomenon of artification of everyday experience. Using the concept of “artification” developed in the field of Everyday Aesthetics, I define the non-artistic experience, which is co-shaped by art and related to its models of perception. As the consequence of this mechanism, I indicate the tendency to project some artistic cognitive schemas (or their elements) to the existing reality. As a result of this process, events and non-artistic views are captured in the image of art, as ”art-like”. The process of the interpenetration of the fields of art and non-art may lead in turn to the reversal of the mimetic order – when artistic creation determines the forms of examining the world to the extent that it creates the effect of “life imitating art”. This phenomenon of formalizing experience according to artistic models is illustrated by examples from the linguistics, visual arts and literature.

Artyfikacja codzienności i odwrócony mimetyzm, czyli życie, które naśladuje sztukę

In this paper, I analyse the phenomenon of artification of everyday experience. Using the concept of “artification” developed in the field of Everyday Aesthetics, I define the non-artistic experience, which is co-shaped by art and related to its models of perception. As the consequence of this mechanism, I indicate the tendency to project some artistic cognitive schemas (or their elements) to the existing reality. As a result of this process, events and non-artistic views are captured in the image of art, as ”art-like”. The process of the interpenetration of the fields of art and non-art may lead in turn to the reversal of the mimetic order – when artistic creation determines the forms of examining the world to the extent that it creates the effect of “life imitating art”. This phenomenon of formalizing experience according to artistic models is illustrated by examples from the linguistics, visual arts and literature.

Everyday Aesthetics in Indian Cultural Communities

Everyday Aesthetics in Indian Cultural Communities

Seeing new in the familiar: intensifying aesthetic engagement with the city through new location-based technologies

ABSTRACTUnderstanding better the effects of the use of mobile apps to the use and appreciation of urban environments has been gaining more prominence as a research topic recently due to the increasing everyday use of these apps. Whether this type of digital mediation changes the lived experience is of interest in this article. The intention is to show that besides changing the prevailing practices and behaviour, new technologies also enhance and add positive value to the everyday urban experience. This positive experiential value is approached with the framework consisting of recent advances in philosophical urban and everyday aesthetics, which put emphasis on both familiarity and fun as important qualities that describe the everyday experience in urban environments. We claim that new digital tools increase the quality of fun when moving in familiar surroundings. Fun, understood through the lens of the aesthetic, precedes the experienced quality of playfulness. It alters the existing affordances of the urban environment in a way that make more complex aesthetic qualities emerge. The case examples are GPS-based wayfinding applications such as route planners and navigation tools for pedestrian use and related AR applications such as the popular game app Pokémon GO.

Los orígenes de la estética de lo cotidiano : John Dewey y la noción de experiencia estética.

La estética de lo cotidiano es una nueva área de investigación que trata de trascender el limitado enfoque que había caracterizado a la estética moderna, reconociendo la continuidad entre las bellas artes y otros aspectos de la vida y reclamando el carácter estético de nuestra vida diaria. Los orígenes de este movimiento, que surge como una crítica a las instituciones y a las teorías ilustradas, pueden rastrearse en el pragmatismo de John Dewey y su noción de experiencia estética. El filósofo prepara el camino para la estética de lo cotidiano al situar el carácter estético en la experiencia, en lugar de en objetos o en situaciones específicas. Este trabajo considera la noción deweyana de experiencia estética, ofreciendo una nueva aproximación desde la cual actualizar su estética. Para ello, analizaré las principales cualidades que definen el término, evidenciando su potencial para superar las críticas de Yuriko Saito.

The Everyday Aesthetics of Public Space

The main claim of the article is that everyday aesthetics conceived as a philosophical analysis of everyday objects and situations offers a theoretical perspective that may be applied to the aesthetics of public space. Analysed in aesthetic terms, the public space may be thought to be a space that offers an aesthetic experience to the widest possible public. I contend that the aesthetic quality of public space should be a quality that favours positive experiences of the everyday, banal practices taking place in it. Accordingly, designing public space should consist in making it “everyday experience-friendly.” My argument will be illustrated by the example of a site-specific installation, the Oxygenator, created in Warsaw by Joanna Rajkowska, whose intention was to offer people an ordinary place where they could meet in a “healthy atmosphere.”

Od poznatog do misterioznog - estetika atmosfera u domaćim prostorima

The notion of "familiar" has recently become crucial in the debate generated by Everyday Aesthetics. In this essay, I will explore this concept in the theories of Arto Haapala and Yuriko Saito, then I will examine the notion of familiar - and some antonym notions (i.e. strange, uncanny, alien) - while embracing a phenomenological approach. Referring to German phenomenologist Gernot Böhme's theory of atmospheres, my paper compares the notion of a glass house, theorised by Modernism, and the notion of a shell house, seen from different perspectives by Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard and Juhani Pallasmaa. I will finally draw a parallel with the notion of strange possibly degenerating into the idea of uncanny or alien, for instance when the transparency of glass is used as a tool for control or when it is embodied in the digital screens of hypertechnological homes.

New Public Monuments: Urban Art and Everyday Aesthetic Experience

Abstract The role and function of public art is currently undergoing some large-scale changes. Many new artworks which are situated within the already existing urban sphere, seem to be changing the definition of public art, each in their own way. Simultaneously, there exists a trend that endorses more traditional forms of public art. Juxtaposing and comparing the aesthetic implications of different types of artworks, it is possible to see how they contribute to the contemporary understanding of the urban sphere. In this paper, I take a look at the explicit and implicit aesthetic values that these simultaneously existing contemporary forms of public art are based on. The cases selected for closer look are examples of prominent and recent works of public art from downtown Helsinki: He who Brings the Light (unveiled in 2017) by Pekka Kauhanen and Running Man (performed in 2016-17) by Nestori Syrjala. What space and what kind of position is subscribed to the perceiver by these very different types of yet equally established artworks? What kind of experiences and possibilities of participation do these works entail? The focus is on the undergoing redefinition of public art that revolves around these questions.

A Study on the Meaning of Gardens as Educational Spaces*: Based on Everyday Aesthetic Engagement

A Study on the Meaning of Gardens as Educational Spaces*: Based on Everyday Aesthetic Engagement

A New Paradigm Relating Art and Sport

In this article, I outline ways in which sport can be reconsidered as drawing aesthetic and philosophical depth from the rarefied domain of art. I do this by arguing that sport, as an everyday aesthetics, is an extension of art aesthetics and this is given further weight by Gumbrecht’s argument that indeed sport is formally beautiful, drawing on its artistic heritage as such. I offer three basic underpinnings for such a perspective, namely aesthesis, play and empathy. In so doing, the dialectic between art and sport promises a cross-pollination and inter-disciplinary venture that has both theoretical and practical implications.

When Social Practice Art Overcomes Globalisation: Attending to Environment and Locality in Taiwan

AbstractThis essay discusses how artists, architects, and local community people have collaborated together to regenerate an everyday life aesthetics that embodies and reflects the environmental specificity of local culture, history, and geography in the context of Taiwan, where systematic urbanisation has had a very negative impact in many different areas since the early 2000s. The essay explores the possibility of local aesthetics retrieving the feelings of the Taiwanese “vernacular worlds” against the effects of globalisation, urbanisation and rapid socio-political changes. Two social practice art projects are considered accordingly: Plum Tree Creek and Togo Village.

Everyday aesthetics and Jacques Rancière: reconfiguring the common field of aesthetics and politics

ABSTRACTAesthetics has been a matter of politics and not only of philosophy from the very beginning. Its subversive power has for a long time been explored mostly in the context of artworks. However, it is only quite recently that the discourse of everyday aesthetics has been reaffirming the potential of aesthetics to affect the perception of the sensible. By indicating the ways that enable to redistribute the sensible, everyday aesthetics engages in going beyond the insurmountable divide between the sensuous and the intelligible, once established by Plato. The article intends to provide a theoretical basis for thinking the potential of everyday aesthetics in a political perspective. By questioning the nature of this redistribution in the Rancière’s thinking and indicating its possible configurations and applications in the present world, we intend to explore more extensively its implications for the discourse of everydays aesthetics. Is everyday aesthetics increasingly adopting a thoroughly nonmetaphysical and rather pragmatist attitude towards the ever-changing reality? Is the distribution of the sensible just another way to think the Platonic divide between the sensuous and the intelligible and their constant conflict in our experience? Is the potential of the politics to redistribute the sensible given in the emerging realm of everyday aesthetics. By exploring the connexion between politics and aesthetics, the article demonstrates the potential of Rancière’s theory for launching new explorations in the field of everyday aesthetics.

Urban Mobility—Urban Discovery

In this paper I investigate how different modes of urban transportation shape our experience of the urban environment. My goal is to argue that how we move through a space is not merely a question of convenience or efficiency. Rather, our transportation technologies can fundamentally shift how we experience where we are. I propose a framework for considering mobility from the standpoint of phenomenological everyday aesthetics considering the social, somatic, temporal-epistemic, and affective characteristics of experience. I then suggest a typology of different forms of urban mobility distinguishing between private and public forms of transportation as well as between faster and slower modes. I next suggest a trio of factors—speed, ability to survey one’s surroundings, and ease of interruption—that play into how we experience an urban environment while discovering it by means of mobility. By applying the framework of experience and the trio of factors to the typology of transportation modes I show how each of them can foster or hinder an aesthetic experience of the urban environment. I conclude by reflecting on some further issues for investigation including the role of power in urban space, questions concerning mobility and difference (class, race, dis/ability, etc.), the place of technological mediation in urban mobility, and the role of spatial planning.

Beyond the Call of Beauty: Everyday Aesthetic Demands Under Patriarchy

This paper defends two claims. First, we will argue for the existence of aesthetic demands in the realm of everyday aesthetics, and that these demands are not reducible to moral demands. Second, we will argue that we must recognise the limits of these demands in order to combat a widespread form of gendered oppression. The concept of aesthetic supererogation offers a new structural framework to understand both the pernicious nature of this oppression and what may be done to mitigate it.

O cotidiano como utopia: novas relações de espaço e tempo no mundo da arte contemporânea

This paper investigates how utopia is a recurring term in the contemporary art world. The spread of collaborative relations - through art collectives, artistic residences, artivism - and the valorization of these practices by institutions afterwards is a frequent process in the art world today. In this paper I will discuss the discourse produced by artists, curators and theorists, thinking if these artistic practices in the world of contemporary art can work as a representation of the way in which contemporary culture has established its relationship with time and space. The hypothesis that I sustain here is that we live in a scenario where the art world valorizes collective artistic experiences that are associated with everyday aesthetics and afterwards classify it as a new utopia. A new temporality seems to emerge in the present culture, along with this, different utopian discourses rise in art. This type of art places itself as the utopia of the everyday life, constructed for the present time in the urban space. Thus, the focus of this paper is to make a brief theoretical study on contemporaneity which points to important changes in the way in which individuals relate to everyday experience, narrative and memory, in order to understand the recent transformations in the world of contemporary art.Keywords: contemporary art, daily life, utopia, art collectives.

Towards an Archaeology of Everyday Aesthetics

The concept of aesthetics has long been marginalized in archaeology. It was originally formulated in the eighteenth century as part of an appreciation of Greek art and was fundamentally concerned with appreciating a quasi-universal idea of beauty; and as archaeologists and anthropologists recognized the distortion created by applying it to material from non-Western and pre-modern art, it fell into disfavour. An alternative anthropological approach pioneered by Howard Morphy regards aesthetics as the study of the affects of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties; this converges with the emerging philosophical study of ‘everyday aesthetics’. This article explores how archaeologists could apply these concepts, particularly through a study of Maltese Neolithic everyday aesthetics.

An Educational Perspective and a Poststructural Position on Everyday Aesthetics and the Creation of Meaning

Research Article| October 01 2017 An Educational Perspective and a Poststructural Position on Everyday Aesthetics and the Creation of Meaning Frederick Johannes Potgieter Frederick Johannes Potgieter Frederick J. Potgieter is professor in art history at the University of South Africa. He has published widely on modern and contemporary aesthetics and visual art. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Aesthetic Education (2017) 51 (3): 72–90. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.51.3.0072 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Frederick Johannes Potgieter; An Educational Perspective and a Poststructural Position on Everyday Aesthetics and the Creation of Meaning. Journal of Aesthetic Education 1 January 2017; 51 (3): 72–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.51.3.0072 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Aesthetic Education Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Definición de estética cotidiana

Este artículo responde a la reciente controversia en torno al concepto de estética cotidiana, intentando plantear una sucinta definición dirigida a esclarecer el objeto de estudio. A fin de posibilitar su uso y accesibilidad, el artículo acude intencionalmente a la brevedad.