Everyday Aesthetics Research Articles

The Neo-Nomadic Artist

Sarawut Chutiwongpeti’s artwork focuses on issues related to cultural transformation, global mobility and the precarious situation of the neo-nomadic artist. Everyday aesthetics play an important role in his installations where he works with consumer packaging, mainly from food products, to represent how things and people from around the world converge in a single location.

日常性に向け拡大された美的概念 : 斎藤百合子『日常性の美学』を手がかりに(第六十六回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

日常性に向け拡大された美的概念 : 斎藤百合子『日常性の美学』を手がかりに(第六十六回美学会全国大会発表要旨)

Adivasi aesthetic knowing: A duographic account

Abstract Using the different voices of the mentor and mentee, we engage with the notion of creating and conferring aesthetic significance as it occurs in the everyday lives of everyday peoples. We investigate how the arts empower marginalized ‘voice’ by enabling multimodal expressions and access to information that other methods may not elicit. This article takes the form of a ‘duography’, reporting an empirical study that focused upon an Adi Jan Jaati or Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) of Jharkhand, in north-eastern India. In particular, we focus upon this indigenous community’s epistemic and aesthetic practices. The article thus offers discussions on how aesthetic experiences and activities are essential means of being, of engagement and communication, and of (re)building trust with the community. We conclude by demonstrating the relevance of everyday aesthetics for the development of sustainable educational systems and future citizenship. Standing back, we acknowledge the reciprocal learning that occurs between the researcher and the ‘researched’, the doctoral student and supervisor.

On thinking about the nexus between art and everyday aesthetics

Because certain aestheticians attempt to keep art and everyday aesthetics apart, the aim of this article is to question whether it is tenable and beneficial to do so. To this end, poststructural thinking is employed to argue that essentialist aesthetics does not hold water and that the deconstruction of such opens the door for thinking art and quotidian aesthetics together. This is not a trivial matter, because by resisting reciprocity between art and everyday aesthetic life, one stands to impoverish both.

On intersubjectivity in art and everyday aesthetics

ABSTRACTCertain aestheticians attempt to define everyday aesthetics by describing it as radically private, subjective and nondiscursive. The main aim of this article is to counter this restrictive, isolationist approach to everyday aesthetics by pointing to the role of intersubjective, discursive, institutional arenas in fostering meaningful everyday aesthetic experience. To this end, the first part of the article conducts a historical and hermeneutical exploration of how modern subjectivity was initially constructed, later problematised, and how today it is often reconstructed as intersubjectivity by poststructuralism and the Artworld. I then turn to how this issue is playing out in the current discourse on everyday aesthetics. The second part of the article shows that prominent contemporary aestheticians agree that language has the potential to enrich ineffable aesthetic experience in all walks of life. I extend this broad perspective by arguing that differential discourse is particularly appropriate for this task. In conclusion, I suggest that by demarcating everyday aesthetics as private and as the “other” of the contemporary Artworld – by retrogressively defining it in terms of subjective experience – there is a risk of marginalising this important area of aesthetic interest and of impoverishing both art and everyday aesthetic life.

Editor’s introduction

Although cities have been philosophically important since ancient times, the development of phenomenology and, to a lesser degree environmental and everyday aesthetics, made possible the aesthetic consideration of urban life. Unlike much of Western philosophy, phenomenology takes seriously that human beings inhabit a lifeworld, in which they live as embodied beings together with others. These three emphases—world, embodiment and intersubjectivity—together make possible the aesthetic investigation of urban life. I provide a brief survey of current work in urban aesthetics before introducing the five papers that comprise this issue.

The Sabar Ways of Knowing Through the Arts

Abstract We engage with the significance of aesthetic experience as it is created and conferred in the everyday lives of everyday peoples, in this case, the indigenous Sabar tribes of Jharkhand, India. Through several months of fieldwork, we found that arts and aesthetic practices are integral to Sabar "ways of knowing, being, and doing." We examine definitions and identify limitations before introducing the social actors of the study. We illustrate how the arts empower "voice" by enabling multimodal expressions and access to data that other methods may not elicit. This paper offers discussions on how aesthetic experiences and activities are essential means of being; furthermore, it highlights the relevance of everyday aesthetics for the development of sustainable educational systems and future citizenship.

Cold War binaries and the culture of consumption in the late Soviet home

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to challenge Cold War binaries, seeking a more nuanced understanding of popular experience of change in the Soviet Union’s last decades. This was a period of intensive modernization and rapid transformation in Soviet citizens’ everyday material environment, marked by the mass move to newly constructed housing and by changing relations with goods.Design/methodology/approach– To probe popular experience and changing meanings, the paper turns to qualitative, subjective sources, drawing on oral history interviews (Everyday Aesthetics in the Modern Soviet Flat, 2004-2007).Findings– The paper finds that qualitative changes took place in Soviet popular consumer culture during the 1960s-1970s, as millions of people made home in new housing amid the widespread media circulation of authoritative images representing a desirable modern lifestyle and modernist aesthetic. Soviet people began to make aesthetic or semiotic distinctions between functionally identical goods and were concerned to find the right furniture to fit a desired lifestyle, aesthetic ideal and sense of self.Research limitations/implications– The problem is how to conceptualize the trajectory of change in ways that do justice to historical subjects’ experience and narratives, while avoiding uncritically reproducing Cold War binaries or perpetuating the normative status claimed by the postwar West in defining modernity and consumer culture.Originality/value– The paper challenges dominant Cold War narratives, according to which Soviet popular relations with goods were encompassed by shortage and necessity. It advances understanding of the specific form of modern consumer culture, which, it argues, took shape in the USSR after Stalin.

Estética cotidiana y ficción: el clima como elemento de significación en la novela Pequod de Vitor Ramil

Estética cotidiana y ficción: el clima como elemento de significación en la novela Pequod de Vitor Ramil

Introduction: Special Issue on Afro-Americanophilia in Germany

From a ‘provincial’ and (hopefully) self-aware European perspective, it is clear that cultural forms or practices that originated among African Americans have, beyond their value to African Americans themselves and people elsewhere, contributed tremendously to life on the European continent. Those contributions include everything from the political imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, through philosophical thought, to literature, film, television, theatre, dance, sports, visual culture and everyday aesthetics. Most prominent, perhaps, have been forms of music—blues and jazz to r’n’b, rap, and hybrid electronic music forms—all of which have ‘furnished’ European listeners’ lives, whatever their so-called race. While deeply embedded racism can run through these processes of cultural flow, transfer, and appropriation, and numerous forms of exploitation are at work, in many cases there is also an ambiguous love for Black diasporic culture, at least according to the appropriating subjects’ view of themselves, which manifests itself in admiration, desire, a sense of affinity or connection, and sometimes in fantasies of ‘becoming black.’ This issue’s papers, which present case studies of what we will call Afro-Americanophilia, address the forms, ambiguities and politics involved in these cultural processes in 20th-century Germany.

Everyday life in Russia past and present

Introduction Part I. Approaches to Everyday Life 1. The Scholarship of Everyday Life / David L. Ransel 2. Provincial Nobles, Elite History and the Imagination of Everyday Life / Mary Cavender 3. Resisting Resistance: Everyday life, Practical Competence and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Postsocialist Russia / Olga Shevchenko, 4. The Oil Company and the Crafts Fair: From Povsednevnost' to Byt in Postsocialist Russia / Douglas Rogers Part II. Public Identities and Public Space 5. 'We don't talk about ourselves': Women Academics Recall Their Path to Success / Natalia Pushkareva 6. The Literature of Everyday Life and Popular Representations of Motherhood in Brezhnev's Time / Elizabeth Skomp 7. 'They Are Taking That Air From Us': Sale of Commonly Enjoyed Properties to Private Developers / David L. Ransel Part III. Living Space and Personal Choice 8. Everyday Life and the Problem of Conceptualizing Public and Private during the Khrushchev Era / Deborah A. Field 9. Soviet Mass Housing and the Communist Way of Life / Steven E. Harris 10. Everyday Aesthetics in the Khrushchev-Era Standard Apartment / Susan E. Reid 11. The Soviet Communal Apartment Lives On, Adapting to Post-Soviet Conditions / Ilya Utekhin Part IV. Myth, Memory, and the History of Everyday Life 12. Everyday Stalinism in Transition-Era Film / Peter C. Pozefsky 13. Totality Decomposed: Objectalizing Late Socialism in Post-Soviet Biochronicles / Serguei Oushakine 14. Everyday Life and the Ties that Bind in Liudmila Ulitskaia's Medea and Her Children / Benjamin Sutcliffe Part V. Coming Home: Transnational Connections 15. Sino-Soviet Every Day: Chinese Revolutionaries in Moscow Military Schools, 1927-1930 / Elizabeth McGuire 16. Coming Home Soviet Style: The Reintegration of Afghan Veterans into Soviet Everyday Life / Karen Petrone 17. Everyday Life in Transnational Perspective: Consumption, Consumerism, and Party Favors, 1917-1939 / Choi Chatterjee Afterword / Sheila Fitzpatrick Bibliography

Sibley and the Limits of Everyday Aesthetics

Abstract Sherri Irvin has claimed that “our everyday lives have an aesthetic character that is thoroughgoing and available at every moment, should we choose to attend to it.” She defends this claim by appeal to a modified Deweyan conception of the aesthetic. I bring Irvin’s discussion into dialogue with Frank Sibley’s reflections on the limits of the aesthetic in his posthumously published “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics.” Sibley uses standing debates on the aesthetic dimensions of tastes and smells as a way of exploring the different conceptions of the “aesthetic” that fund such debates. I use Sibley’s structural analysis of debates about the scope of the aesthetic to call into question the ways in which Irvin uses her modified Deweyan view to extend the notion of the aesthetic to embrace everyday experiences. I argue that, in modifying Dewey’s own account, she effectively eliminates some distinctions that are necessary if the concept of the aesthetic is to play the role accorded to it more generally in sorting our experiences and their objects. I further suggest how we might defend Irvin’s more general claims in terms of a Sibleyan conception of the scope of the aesthetic.

Talking about Beauty: A Study of Everyday Aesthetics among Low‐Income Citizens of Milan

This paper reports on research undertaken into the aesthetics of the everyday. As well as the subject matter of aesthetic philosophy, art criticism and of the sociology of art, beauty, and beautiful are of course very ordinary matters too. To shed light on the meanings of beauty as used in everyday settings and in natural language, we use the data collected in a study conducted with a group of low‐income residents of the city of Milan. In this study we were interested in analyzing their lifestyle in terms of their relationship with aesthetics, i.e., with “beautiful” objects and/or experiences. Participants' self‐reported aesthetic appreciations suggest that conceptions of “beauty” are used as devices to narrate pieces of identity, memories, experiences, etc. Their aesthetic judgements take on an anthropological function, creating a framework of meanings that help the participants make sense of the world of objects and of their own lives with/through them.

Transactional Experiential Inquiry: From Pragmatism to Somaesthetics

In responding to five symposium articles that discuss my book Thinking through the Body and my theories of somaesthetics and pragmatism, this essay elaborates two central methodological orientations that guide my philosophical research. The first is transactional experiential inquiry in which inquiry can develop new directions, aims, methods, and standards through the dynamic experiences acquired in the course of the inquiry’s pursuit and in which its transactional experiences involve research that transcends familiar disciplinary limits and conventions. The second principle involves mitigating problematic dualisms by a strategy of inclusive disjunction. I deploy these principles in replying to the five commentaries. Besides clarifying issues in somaesthetics, my reply focuses on such topics as everyday aesthetics, eroticism, architecture, dance, Chinese philosophy, meliorism, and pragmatism.

Aesthetic Imagination in Football

In my previous texts on aesthetics of sport and of football, the accent was on dramatic aesthetic properties and on everyday aesthetics as a proper framework for the aesthetics of sport in general and football in particular. Here, following this starting point, the character of football as a game of social interactions (a feature pointed out by many sociologists) and its character of purposive sport are examined, to find out what could be the most important aesthetic condition for playing the game and being-in-the-game. To get at the core of the aesthetic side of football, the concept of aesthetic imagination is introduced as a necessary condition for playing the game of football, and three aesthetic regimes for creation of possible worlds or symbolic forms such as football are discussed (mimesis, representation and simulation). There are two steps where the aesthetic imagination helps. The first one is at the entrance where we are leaving ordinary everyday life behind, being ready to accept the world of football as an extraordinary possible universe. The other one is there to allow playing the game: incessant movement of two teams and their 22 members together with a ball creates a space in which one (be it an individual member or the team as a whole) cannot move according to rules and purpose of football without plugging in the aesthetic imagination which makes being-in-the-game possible.

The Aesthetics of Design, by Jane Forsey

For some time now, an emancipation struggle has been going on in aesthetics. First, the central place of beauty was questioned by such philosophers as Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Nelson Goodman, who favoured other aesthetic properties and other ways of evaluating art. Next, the central place of art was questioned by Ronald Hepburn in an article that called attention to the aesthetic appreciation of nature (Ronald W. Hepburn, ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’, in Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (eds.), British Analytical Philosophy , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 285–310). This second struggle, in so far as it aims to de-centre the arts, has recently been joined by a number of philosophers who are grouped together under the label of Everyday Aesthetics . Jane Forsey is among them, as she makes clear in her book, The Aesthetics of Design . According to Forsey, the preoccupation with the (fine) arts is responsible, at least in part, for the marginalization of aesthetics within philosophy. However, for reasons to be given, Forsey is also fiercely critical of the Everyday Aesthetics movement. Moreover, she is willing to accord pride of place to the property of beauty, so the first emancipation struggle is one that she does not join.

Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body and Everyday Aesthetics

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I also question the limits of somaesthetics and Shusterman’s rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary.

Re-Envisioning Iran Online

Digital photography and the Internet play important roles in contemporary cultures. They can create semiotic spaces in which ‘local’ imaginaries are projected in ‘global’ frames and cultural representations can be collectively challenged. This article discusses the genre of popular photography and its convergence with the Iranian social web in the form of photoblogs (photography-oriented blogs). It describes how everyday images posted on photoblogs playfully move beyond representative tropes that constitute a visual legacy in contemporary Iran. The findings provide insights into contemporary Iranian online visual-cultural production and develop wider theoretical understandings of the social uses of digital photography, including notions of ‘everyday aesthetics’. The ways in which Iranian photobloggers select, curate, exhibit and manipulate personal digital photographs on their photoblogs are shown to be exemplary of a contemporary ethnographic ‘digital-visual moment’ of popular cultural storytelling, existing at the interface of local and global, as well as actual and virtual publics.

The Spectator and Everyday Aesthetics

The Spectator and Everyday Aesthetics

Stanje estetike danas

In this paper I argue for the possibility of expanding the field of aesthetics not only beyond art and beauty but also beyond everyday aesthetics (or prosaics) centered in human sensibility. This implies considering sensibility or aesthesis in all live beings to understand the vastness of bio-aesthetics. Part of this query is zoo-aesthetics. We have such growing evidence, enriched day by day, that animals are capable of creating, recreating, imitating, enjoying, exhibiting and expressing sensibility or aesthetic taste in various forms that it is harder to deny the more we record and witness their behavior. Moreover, as there are various artistic genres, we can equally speak of similar genres in zoo-poetics, namely: a) musical b) visual (both architectonic and decorative), c) drama, and d) dance. Are females enamored by the male bat or bird mating song? Do peahens feel pleasure at the sight of a male peacock's tail? As Nagel asked 'what is it like to be a bat?' I would really like to know what it is like to be a peahen. This full inquiry is being published in The indispensable excess of the aesthetics: evolution of sensibility in nature. (Lexington 2015).