Everyday Aesthetics Research Articles

Review 1 of "Everyday Aesthetics, Space, and the Sensory: Fear of Crime and Affect in Inner Sydney"

Review 1 of "Everyday Aesthetics, Space, and the Sensory: Fear of Crime and Affect in Inner Sydney"

Review 2 of "Everyday Aesthetics, Space, and the Sensory: Fear of Crime and Affect in Inner Sydney"

Review 2 of "Everyday Aesthetics, Space, and the Sensory: Fear of Crime and Affect in Inner Sydney"

A Deweyan Approach to the Dilemma of Everyday Aesthetics

Everyday aesthetics is a new sub-discipline of aesthetic theory that has only been actively discussed since the 1980s. This paper addresses what many consider the central issue of the field, called “the dilemma of everyday aesthetics.” I discuss three authors who address this issue: Yuriko Saito, Allen Carlson, and Paisley Livingston. Drawing on Dewey’s anti-dualist stance, I argued for a continuity between the aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art. In course of my discussion, I question such dichotomies as that between the practical and the aesthetic, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and disinterestedness vs. engagement. In my view, the dilemma is only real for those who wish to maintain relatively rigid distinctions within these dichotomies. The dilemma is only a dilemma if you think there is something disturbing about the thought that low-level aesthetic experiences are enhanced when attended to and when understood or appreciated differently by way of the arts.

Introduction to Pragmatist Legacies in Aesthetics

This paper aims to map and highlight the diverse heritage of Pragmatism in aesthetics. It argues that pragmatist aesthetics represents an interesting third way of doing aesthetics beyond the analytic philosophy of art and continental aesthetics. It offers a first, provisional sketch of existing research trends in pragmatist aesthetics, such as somaesthetics, environmental aesthetics, everyday aesthetics, and social aesthetics. Furthermore, it identifies some “family resemblances” connecting most pragmatist “relatives” in the field of aesthetics: the idea that (1) aesthetics is broader than the traditional philosophy of art, (2) the criticism of the view of art as constituting an independent realm or an autonomous system, (3) the thesis of a basic continuity between artistic practices and experience “in the raw,” (4) the adoption of a naturalistic yet non-reductive stance, and (5) a broadly socio-political inspiration.

Instagram and intermodal configurations of value

Abstract This paper explores how ideological positions associated with food are construed multimodally in Instagram posts produced by everyday social media users. Discourse about food choices is an important site for revealing syndromes of values that characterise the ideological positions that are embedded in everyday life. An example of a highly valued food is the avocado which is an important bonding icon in semantic domains from veganism, clean eating, keto/low-carb eating, ethical/sustainable eating to fitness. We explore how values associated with avocado toast are enacted intermodally through the interplay of meanings made in the images, captions, and tags in a corpus of 64,585 Instagram posts tagged #avotoast. The study draws on previous social semiotic work on visual intersubjectivity and everyday aesthetics in social photography (Zhao and Zappavigna 2018a) to interpret the visual meanings made in these posts. It also draws on research into intermodal coupling (image-text relations) and ambient affiliation (online social bonding) (Zappavigna 2018) to understand how different values are construed in these texts. A modified grounded theory approach is used to isolate and exemplify the visual and textual features at stake, and then to explore ideological positionings through close multimodal analysis. A particularly interesting pattern in the corpus is the interaction of aesthetic and moralising discourses. For instance, a regulative metadiscourse realised through hashtags is used to project an instructional discourse about how to eat and what is considered ethical, sustainable, and nutritious food consumption. Rather than being directly encoded as judgement of behaviour these assessments tended to be expressed as appreciation of food items and their aesthetics or worth (e.g., clean, healthy, etc.).

The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs. Andrew Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+248.

<i>The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs</i>. Andrew Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+248.

Everyday aesthetics and world-making

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations have serious consequences which determine the quality of life and the state of the world, for better or worse. This power of the aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a normative dimension to everyday aesthetics, I argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse.

Beautiful places and recreating humanity in South Africa

The article investigates the connection between beauty and justice, by exploring everyday aesthetics through ordinary life, specifically the very concrete reality of contemporary urban South Africa. On the one hand, it delves beneath the statement that apartheid is ugly, by exploring the ugly spaces apartheid created, the devastation of an aesthetic built on segregation, and the distortions of whiteness. It also seeks to explore a theological aesthetic that starts from the ordinary life lived in particular places, arguing that beauty in particular places must be interwoven with humanness in all places, and proposing a theological aesthetic that gives priority to the voices silenced in particular places. Through this, beauty and justice are intimately interwoven in the ongoing work of disruption and transformation of a white racist place.

“It’s classy because you can’t see things”: data from a project co-creating sexy images of young women

ABSTRACT Public and academic debates about sexualisation suggest that selfies taken by women of their own bodies, for display on Instagram, are sexualising and harming them. This paper reports on a “compare and contrast” project where a professional photographer (myself) took photographs of women who are sexy self-representers on Instagram. It is an examination of the aesthetics and practices of amateur and professional photography in this context, and draws attention to the role of class in making aesthetic judgements about women’s sexy selfies. I argue that these respective photographic regimes produce and affirm their own sets of values which reveal the hierarchical and prejudiced nature of visual (and wider) culture as it relates to representations of women’s bodies. I report on the verbal and visual languages used by participants and myself to make visible differing classed standards, through the concepts of what is “tasteful” and what is “vulgar”. Dominant discourses about sexualised self-representations of women that focus on risks to the selfie-taker mask prejudices regarding class. The privileging of professional or “high art” aesthetics over amateur, “everyday aesthetics” perpetuates a policing and marginalising of women’s bodies and sexualities and helps maintain long-standing ideals of female respectability and sexual decorum.

Everyday Aesthetics, Locality and Racialisation

In this essay we reflect on the relationship between aesthetic practices and racialised conceptions of belonging. In particular, we explore attributions of beauty and ugliness, order and disorder, as these are made in relation to local space, and we consider how these attributions can be linked to proprietorial claims about who is welcome in those spaces. Our focus is thus on the everyday aesthetics of location: the ways in which aesthetic judgements are tied to the inhabitation of space and, in this case, the exclusionary potential of ‘ways of looking’ at such spaces and at the social relations which exist within them. Drawing on data from qualitative research in two adjoining neighbourhoods in Glasgow’s Southside, we make three analytical contributions. First, we consider the racialising potential of everyday aesthetic responses to local space. Second, we explore the ways in which local social relations themselves can be aesthetically interpreted. Third, we reflect on forms of everyday aesthetic resistance.

An Introduction to Everyday Aesthetics in Education

The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well as the pedagogical purposes of daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12 years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life.

Aesthetic Consolation: A Possible Remedy for Solastalgia in James Bradley’s Clade (2017)

Climate change is one of the significant and threatening problems worldwide. It has attracted the attention of scientists and politicians as well as writers and critics especially in the western world. Writers have responded by writing climate change fiction despite the challenges of representation. James Bradley, an Australian novelist and critic, is one of those writers who are deeply occupied by the impacts of climate change. He has written Clade (2017) which traces the life of Adam Leith, a climatologist, and his family descendants amid the disastrous consequences of climate change. To analyze this novel, the researcher focuses on solastalgia, and applies the approach of everyday aesthetics. In a nutshell, the paper attempts to highlight the impact of climate change, examine the relationship between the characters and their environment, and explore the possibility of adaptation and detection of aesthetic values in an environment destroyed by climate change.

La experiencia del asombro: una aproximación expansiva a la estética cotidiana

A diferencia de Melchionne (2013) y Naukkarinen (2013), abogo por una definición expansiva de la estética cotidiana que, además de las experiencias más comunes y cotidianas, incluya los festivales, el turismo y un sinnúmero de actividades llevadas a cabo diariamente por artistas y profesionales de diversas áreas. Establezco continuidades entre las estéticas de la vida diaria, del arte y de la naturaleza. Por ejemplo, el acto de mirar a través de una ventana puede involucrar aspectos de las tres estéticas. Aunque coincido con Melchionne (2013) en que la estética cotidiana está muy ligada a las preguntas por la búsqueda del bienestar subjetivo, asumo una aproximación más expansiva basada en estudios sicológicos recientes sobre la experiencia del asombro; ello con el fin de enfatizar la importancia de esa experiencia en tal búsqueda, vinculando así, los aspectos más sobresalientes de la estética cotidiana, la estética del arte y la estética de la naturaleza.

A Study on Art Education for Adults Based on the everyday aesthetics of Zhuangzi

A Study on Art Education for Adults Based on the everyday aesthetics of Zhuangzi

What can everyday aesthetics teach us about jazz practice?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains how the evolving field of everyday aestheticsseeks to offer an alternative to the 'tendency to equate aesthetics with the philosophyof art' by arguing that aesthetic experiences are present in many aspects of dailylife. Furthermore, the article highlights the fact that often what counts as an everydayactivity for one person might be much more unusual for another. Consequently, despitethe fact that there are some activities that are largely common to all of us-eating, sleeping-it should also be acknowledged that context plays a vital role in the discourse onthe everyday. In this article I will examine how concepts that arise in the discourse oneveryday aesthetics relate to the understanding of contemporary jazz performance practice.I will focus on how the daily practice and performance of jazz gives rise to a numberof areas of conceptual questioning, and consider how everyday aesthetics might serveas a model for contextualizing the numerous methodological components of jazz performancepractice. Citing examples from the work of historical musicians-Lee Konitzand Steve Lacy-as well as from my own practice, and with reference to the daily activitiesof instrumental study, group rehearsal and repeated performance, I will present areading of jazz performance practice that seeks to challenge conventional distinctionsbetween the artistic and the everyday.

‘Mississippi, My Home’

This article focuses on the analysis of 'Mississippi, My Home', a blues composition byAfrican-American singer Lavelle White, which posits key issues about the meaningsof home, identity, and everyday aesthetics. Presented as a true story, the song dealswith the idea of returning home to Mississippi. It represents everyday life in a plantationthrough the bond between the narrator and her mother while picking cotton. Therefore,it introduces the listener to an aesthetic of everyday life that combined blues, work songs, and spirituals. Drawing on a personal interview with the artist, as well as on othersources, we will analyse the song as part of a broader interest in the musical discourseof blues. Exploring the song's text and context, the aim is to reach a complex understandingabout the ways in which biography and fiction intertwine with each other in thecreative act of songwriting and musical performance.

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.