Pending on Art

Artification is mostly approached from a contextualist perspective where “art” refers to objects that are presented and appreciated within socially recognized art institutions. Artification then means that the notion of art is extended to non-art areas. Yet it can be argued that contextualism is circular, since it starts with an unquestioned assumption about what art is. Another weakness of contextualism is that by privileging theory it tends to downplay the role of creative and appreciative practices. Alternative approaches are possible, and this article explores in a preliminary way what a naturalist approach could mean for how we see art and artification processes. The naturalist approach developed here considers the arts first of all as cultural practices that evolve together with discourse, but where discourse is not privileged over practice. As Wittgenstein suggested, understanding (and skillfully practicing) any art is about socially mediated, long-term engagement. By analyzing the evolutionary and onto-genetic origins of art and its function in all human cultures, and by describing the criteria of art as a cluster, naturalism opens the border between art and non-art. With naturalism, we can ask whether some of the changes described as artification allow us to recognize art outside institutionally legitimized art worlds. It allows us to ask to what extent something is art; it provides a perspective where phenomena can be studied case by case; and it re-introduces the relevance of evaluative criteria in the process of identifying or recognizing art

Agriculture, Aesthetic Appreciation and the Worlds of Nature

Agriculture has received relatively little attention in environmental aesthetics, given its importance culturally for the physical sustenance of societies and from an eco-system perspective. In this article I take some steps towards developing a life-world approach to the agricultural landscape, where the intimate and long-term relationship between farmer and land is understood as having the potential for being a norm rather than the opposite of an aesthetic appreciation of landscape. This requires a narrative understanding of landscape, where culture and nature are seen as plural and relative to each other. I claim that the aesthetic competence of the farmer is inseparable from personal interest, which makes appreciation more acute and vivid both in perceiving nuances and in realising the existential drama of landscape. Finally I suggest that practicing agriculture is a genuine way of knowing nature and that some familiarity with agriculture should be included in all environmental education

Maisema elintilana : kulttuuri, luonto ja estetiikka

Aineisto on Opiskelijakirjaston digitoimaa ja Opiskelijakirjasto vastaa aineiston käyttöluvist

Ruumiin paikka estetiikassa

Aineisto on Opiskelijakirjaston digitoimaa ja Opiskelijakirjasto vastaa aineiston käyttöluvist

Transformations of the everyday : the social aesthetics of childhood

One of the differences between art and everyday life as generally conceived at least in the West is that while art tends to strive towards novelty, uniqueness and individuality, the aesthetics of the everyday is characterized by familiarity, anonymity, or even the prosaic. In this paper I want to contribute to everyday aesthetics by tentatively exploring an area which bridges art and the everyday in evident, yet under-theorises ways, namely the activity of play. Children play, but they are by no means unique in this, and while my examples will mostly come from childhood I empahsise the broader significance of play as a resource in human life. Play is, like art, an area of active imagination, and the "mimetic dimension" is important in a number of ways. Here I discuss play with and emphasis on its performative aspects: on what goes on and what is done in the fundamentally social, as I argue, activity of play.peerReviewe

Introduction to Doctoral Matters

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Barndomens estetik och estetik i barndomen

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Aesthetic imagination and animate peace

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