scholarly journals A Deweyan Approach to the Dilemma of Everyday Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Vol XIII (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Leddy
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Aesthetics

The Power of Everyday Aesthetics in World-Making

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuriko Saito
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Social Responsibility ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Moral Virtues ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter argues for the importance of cultivating aesthetic literacy and vigilance, as well as practicing aesthetic expressions of moral virtues. In light of the considerable power of the aesthetic to affect, sometimes determine, people’s choices, decisions, and actions in daily life, everyday aesthetics discourse has a social responsibility to guide its power toward enriching personal life, facilitating respectful and satisfying interpersonal relationships, creating a civil and humane society, and ensuring the sustainable future. As an aesthetics discourse, its distinct domain unencumbered by these life concerns needs to be protected. At the same time, denying or ignoring the connection with them decontextualizes and marginalizes aesthetics. Aesthetics is an indispensable instrument for assessing and improving the quality of life and the state of the world, and it behooves everyday aesthetics discourse to reclaim its rightful place and to actively engage with the world-making project.

Challenges and Responses to Everyday Aesthetics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuriko Saito
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
The Rich

Everyday aesthetics is often criticized for lacking aesthetic credentials. Its legitimacy as a discourse is questioned because proximal senses, experiences gained while engaging in an activity, and qualities other than beauty and sublimity are included in its purview. Inclusion of these items is considered to deny a clear ‘object’ of aesthetic appreciation, the possibility of objective judgments, and profundity of aesthetic experience. Excluding them, however, does not do justice to the rich and multifaceted contents of everyday aesthetic life. Phenomenological description, instead of the judgment-oriented and objectivity-seeking discourse, is more appropriate for exploring some dimensions of everyday aesthetic life. In addition, while possibly lacking the same degree of profundity and intensity of beauty and sublimity, the popular appeal of easily recognizable aesthetic qualities deserves to be investigated because of their prevalence and frequent manipulation for commercial and political purposes.

Clive Bell’s "Metaphysical Hypothesis" and Everyday Aesthetics

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 53-60
Author(s):  
Thomas Leddy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Social Meaning ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Deep Meaning ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Formal Properties

Clive Bell’s Art, published in 1913, is widely seen as a founding document in contemporary aesthetics. Yet his formalism and his attendant definition of art as “significant form” is widely rejected in contemporary art discourse and in the philosophy of art. In this paper I argue for a reconsideration of his thought in connection with current discussions of “the aesthetics of everyday life.” Although some, notably Allen Carlson, have argued against application of Bell’s formalism to the aesthetics of everyday life, I claim that this is based on an interpretation of the concept that is overly narrow. First, Li Zehou offers an interpretation of “significant form” that allows in sedimented social meaning. Second, Bell himself offers a more complex theory of significant form by way of his “metaphysical hypothesis,” one that stresses perception of significant form outside the realm of art (for example in nature or in everyday life). Bell’s idea that the artist can perceive significant form in nature allows for significant form to not just be the surface-level formal properties of things. It stresses depth, although a different kind than the cognitive scientific depth Carlson wants. This is a depth that is consistent with the anti-dualism of Spinoza, Marx and Dewey. Reinterpreting Bell in this direction, we can say we are moved by certain relations of lines and colors because they direct our minds to the hidden aspect of things, the spiritual side of the material world referred to by Spinoza and developed by Dewey in his concept of experience. Bell hardly “reduces the everyday to a shadow of itself,” as Carlson puts it, since the everyday, as experienced by the artist or the aesthetically astute observer, has, or potentially has, deep meaning. If we reject Bell’s dualism and his downgrading of sensuous experience, we can rework his idea of pure form to refer to an aspect of things detached, yes, from practical use, but not from particularity or sedimented meaning, not purified of all associations.

scholarly journals Everyday aesthetics and fiction: the significance of weather in Pequod by Vitor Ramil

Anclajes ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-34
Author(s):  
Horacio Pérez-Henao ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Aesthetics

Everyday Style

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Film Style ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
Aesthetic Sensibility ◽  
The Way

Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.

Wim Wenders's Everyday Aesthetics

2018 ◽  
pp. 55-77
Author(s):  
Andrew Light
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Aesthetics

Everyday Aesthetics and the Experience of the Profound

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-202
Author(s):  
Patrick Fessenbecker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Intellectual Content ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Deep Thought

The oldest arguments justifying formal analysis of literature, of course, grow out of a longer tradition in aesthetics, one having its roots in the development of a theory of the aesthetic in the eighteenth century. Ultimately, to emphasize the content over the form in literary interpretation is to emphasize forms of aesthetic value other than the beautiful and the sublime: to read for the content, and particularly for the intellectual content, is to value a book because it is deep, thought-provoking, and profound. Yet far from ignoring a text’s aesthetic nature, in fact these latter ways of reading offer the possibility for a renewed justification for literary aesthetics, one especially salient given the deep skepticism that formalist accounts of aesthetic value evoke.

scholarly journals Everyday Aesthetics, Locality and Racialisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 174997552094942
Author(s):  
Andrew Smith ◽  
Bridget Byrne ◽  
Lindsey Garratt ◽  
Bethan Harries
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Responses ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
The Social ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Local Space ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Made In

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.

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