Reconstructing Heritage: Places, Values, Attachment

As natural catastrophes alter the environment, historical towns and other sites of heritage significance are at risk of being damaged, if not disrupted altogether. How should we confront the prospect of these disasters? And how are we to cope with the reconstructions that will be needed as these phenomena occur? In this paper, I explore philosophical tools for thinking more deeply about the choices surrounding heritage conservation. Recent work in environmental psychology has investigated people’s emotional bond to places and how changes in a place’s structure may pose a threat to individual and social cohesion. Similarly, everyday aestheticians emphasize the role played by quotidian intercourse, relationship, and attachment for the ascription of aesthetic qualities to a site and the environment. Drawing on these researches, I argue that strategies for a sustainable reconstruction must consider the affected community of people, and then the affected artefacts. The leading question is thus whether reconstructions are able to keep the values alive for the people for whom the site is perceived as significant

Everyday Heritage and Place-Making

In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler (2019). Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription on the UNESCO register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance. 

Cultural Tourism: Authenticity, Engagement, and the Everyday

As renown, one main aim of everyday aesthetics is to widen the scope of traditional Western aesthetics beyond the realms of fine arts and nature, so as to uncover the aesthetic potential of the varied phenomena that constitute people's daily life. Tourism and traveling, however, have so far received comparatively little theoretical treatment in the everyday aesthetics literature. This paper attempts to make up for this lack by presenting tourism as a proper object of aesthetic research. Unearthing the aesthetic motivations that animate so-called cultural tourism, it shows that, while searching for 'authenticity' in the visited destination tourists remain trapped in their own, detached, 'tourist gaze'. In order to reconcile this contradiction, we appeal to the theoretical tools provided by everyday aesthetics. After discussing and discarding approaches based on defamiliarization and distancing, we exploit strategies that rely on the adoption of an engaged aesthetic attitude. We conclude by suggesting that the engagement paradigm turns the tourist gaze into a mindful and embodied relation to the visited environment or cultural habit, thereby offering the visitor a chance to appreciate the place's quotidian life while at the same time ensuring aesthetic fulfillment

But is this really authentic? Revising authenticity in restoration philosophy

Over the past few decades debates in the field of conservation have called into question the suppositions underpinning contemporary restoration theory and practice. Restorers seem to base their choices on implicit ideas about the authenticity, identity and value of works of art, ideas that need to undergo a more systematic theoretical evaluation. I begin by focusing on the question of whether authenticity is fully established in the process of the creation of an artwork: namely, at its initial point of existence. One’s interpretation of what makes an artwork authentic will indeed greatly influence how to go about preserving or restoring it. If the answer to the question is affirmative (1), one commits to the idea that authenticity is determined by the work’s creator; thus, it is considered a given, exempt from historical flux. If the answer is negative (2), one takes authenticity to be a combination of initial creation and temporal change; in this sense the work is considered a ‘historical being’. These two conceptions, in turn, come from opposite ontological perspectives on the identity of artworks. Neither of them, however, proves to be truly convincing. I argue that from the point of view of conservation theory we need to consider artworks neither like physical objects nor like living beings, but rather like social objects in Searle’s sense. To this extent, safeguarding authenticity in conservation goes hand in hand with preserving a work’s continuity through enhancing what I call its structural and aesthetic readability. Restoration is thus in its essence a critical act of interpretation which has more to do with the various meanings of an artwork than with its hypothetical original conditions. Rather than just being a win-or-lose affair, authenticity turns out to be the result of a complex set of mutually interacting variables

The Challenge of Authenticity. Music, Plagiarism and the Digital Age

When she died of cancer in June 2006, English pianist Joyce Hatto was hailed as a musical genius by the press. In the previous thirty years, despite illness, she had proven capable of mastering an incredible repertoire, encompassing nearly the entire literature ever composed for piano. Prodigy of old age, she was thought to deserve a place of honour in the annals of classical music. Which, indeed, she obtained – as a plagiarist, though. Hatto’s fake recordings, all stolen from other interpreters, have given rise to one of the greatest scandals in music history. But why do we oppose plagiarism in the first place? More than being just a matter of cultural or sentimental values, in this paper I argue that our rejection of plagiarism has to do with the idea of art itself as a special form of human accomplishment. Unrevealed forgery and plagiarism trigger our admiration through a form of deception: they disguise the accomplishment. Given the advances in the field of audio-visual material digital alteration, there might, however, be increasing confusion in the future over what counts as a fake. Is technology reshaping our view of musical authenticity?Quando morì di cancro, nel giugno 2006, la pianista inglese Joyce Hatto fu salutata dalla stampa come un genio della musica. Nei trent’anni precedenti, nonostante la malattia, si era dimostrata capace di padroneggiare un repertorio incredibile, tale da includere quasi tutta la letteratura esistente per pianoforte. Prodigio della terza età, Hatto sembrava meritare un posto d’onore negli annali della musica classica. E lo ottenne, in effetti – ma come plagiatrice. Le registrazioni di Hatto, tutte false e rubate ad altri interpreti, hanno dato origine a uno dei più grandi scandali della storia della musica. Ma perché rifiutiamo il plagio? In questo articolo sostengo che il nostro rifiuto del plagio, lungi dall’essere solo una questione di valori culturali o sentimentali, ha a che fare con la nozione stessa di arte come una speciale forma di realizzazione umana. Falsificazione e plagio, quando non vengono rivelati, suscitano infatti la nostra ammirazione attraverso una forma di inganno: essi mascherano il risultato finale. Dati i progressi nel campo dell’alterazione digitale del materiale audiovisivo, tuttavia, in futuro potrebbe verificarsi una crescente confusione riguardo a ciò che consideriamo falso. Può la tecnologia indurci a rivedere la nostra visione dell’autenticità musicale

Nel gesto, nell’atto. L’arte della performance tra opera e evento

What kind of art is performance art?  In what sense – if any – can it be defined? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions by drawing on the category of ‘performative gesture’. One crucial manifestation of the character of performance art is the way it challenges our traditional ideas about what art is. A pivotal point is that performance art does not hold up to the traditional notion of artistic creativity as either a process of ‘production’ or ‘reproduction’. It is rather committed to putting the focus of artistic creativity on a special kind of gestures, differing from both the gestures of traditional art and from the gestures of theater. Performative gestures do not ‘bring anything into being’; analogously, they do not ‘mimic’ nor ‘represent’. Instead, they suggest the worrying idea that everything and anything can be considered art: not only every object, but even every ordinary act in everyday life. In this sense, performance art attempts at blurring the boundaries between art and life

Peri-operative red blood cell transfusion in neonates and infants: NEonate and Children audiT of Anaesthesia pRactice IN Europe: A prospective European multicentre observational study

BACKGROUND: Little is known about current clinical practice concerning peri-operative red blood cell transfusion in neonates and small infants. Guidelines suggest transfusions based on haemoglobin thresholds ranging from 8.5 to 12 g dl-1, distinguishing between children from birth to day 7 (week 1), from day 8 to day 14 (week 2) or from day 15 (≥week 3) onwards. OBJECTIVE: To observe peri-operative red blood cell transfusion practice according to guidelines in relation to patient outcome. DESIGN: A multicentre observational study. SETTING: The NEonate-Children sTudy of Anaesthesia pRactice IN Europe (NECTARINE) trial recruited patients up to 60 weeks' postmenstrual age undergoing anaesthesia for surgical or diagnostic procedures from 165 centres in 31 European countries between March 2016 and January 2017. PATIENTS: The data included 5609 patients undergoing 6542 procedures. Inclusion criteria was a peri-operative red blood cell transfusion. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary endpoint was the haemoglobin level triggering a transfusion for neonates in week 1, week 2 and week 3. Secondary endpoints were transfusion volumes, 'delta haemoglobin' (preprocedure - transfusion-triggering) and 30-day and 90-day morbidity and mortality. RESULTS: Peri-operative red blood cell transfusions were recorded during 447 procedures (6.9%). The median haemoglobin levels triggering a transfusion were 9.6 [IQR 8.7 to 10.9] g dl-1 for neonates in week 1, 9.6 [7.7 to 10.4] g dl-1 in week 2 and 8.0 [7.3 to 9.0] g dl-1 in week 3. The median transfusion volume was 17.1 [11.1 to 26.4] ml kg-1 with a median delta haemoglobin of 1.8 [0.0 to 3.6] g dl-1. Thirty-day morbidity was 47.8% with an overall mortality of 11.3%. CONCLUSIONS: Results indicate lower transfusion-triggering haemoglobin thresholds in clinical practice than suggested by current guidelines. The high morbidity and mortality of this NECTARINE sub-cohort calls for investigative action and evidence-based guidelines addressing peri-operative red blood cell transfusions strategies. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier: NCT02350348

Authenticity Lies in the Eye of Beholder: Aesthetics and the Principles of Art Restoration

Abstract Restorers make choices in the light of strong theoretical assumptions. In particular, a notion of conservation as a ‘truth-based’ activity is currently widespread. From this perspective, conservation’s main aim is to maintain or reveal an artwork’s true or authentic nature. This is, however, philosophically puzzling. What is the ‘true state’ of an object? What material condition deserves to be considered ‘authentic’? At a time when preservation of our cultural and artistic heritage is gaining increasing relevance in social discourse, I argue that aestheticians are urged to re-examine this sort of conceptual presuppositions. While the practical exploration of these assumptions is both stimulating and rewarding for philosophers, thinking about these philosophical issues might help museum and heritage workers re-evaluate the principles of their profession and eventually reformulate their codes of practice