Aesthetics of Popular Culture as Environmental Aesthetics

Philosophical aesthetics, like many other academic fields, has in recent years been invigorated by the study of environmental questions and popular culture. Meanwhile, environmental aesthetics has become an independent field in its own right, separate from the philosophy of art, which has traditionally dominated the field of aesthetics. In popular aesthetics, however, the search for identity and the separation from high art and its philosophy are still far from complete. One way to break away from this restrictive relationship is to look for a new point of reference. A new liberating ally of popular aesthetics seems to be found precisely in environmental aesthetics, which came into its own earlier

Everyday Aesthetics and Everyday Behavior

This article addresses everyday aesthetics from the point of view of everyday behavior. I suggest that the ordinary daily interaction of people with each other is one of the most important areas of everyday aesthetics. I present an interpretation of the concepts of both the everyday and aesthetics, and argue that in the context of everyday social relationships, it is wise to understand everyday aesthetics in a way that emphasizes the very everydayness of aesthetics, not its opposite, namely non-everyday or extraordinary aesthetics. This does not mean that extraordinary aesthetics would not have its place in other contexts, but it is not normally the goal in everyday behavior

Philosophical Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life

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Why Beauty Still Cannot Be Measured

This article focuses on the question of whether the latest results achieved in sciences such as evolution studies and brain research can help us understand the nature of aesthetic judgments. It suggests that such approaches may offer interesting insights for understanding many problems in aesthetics, but for clarifying aesthetic judgments one needs a philosophical point of view. Aesthetic judgments cannot be proven right or wrong by scientific methods, and beauty or other aesthetic qualities cannot be directly measured. The “method” of both making and analyzing aesthetic judgments is discussion, and the article clarifies why this is still the case, even if empirical, non-philosophical scientific methods are more accurate than ever before

A taste for borders

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Contemporary Aesthetics: Perspectives on Times, Space and Content

What is contemporary aesthetics? The answer to this question is often simply stated rather than carefully elaborated, even if the current nature and scope of the discipline is far from self-evident. To examine how both the concept and the field of contemporary aesthetics can be understood, I suggest that it is useful to consider three themes: the time, space, and content of aesthetics, i.e., the questions of when, where, and what contemporary aesthetics is. Through this, it is possible to construe a conceptual space of contemporary aesthetics and to compare different instantiations of it with each other

Aesthetics and Mobility - A Short Introduction into a Moving Field

Aesthetics cannot by any means be defined only as philosophy of art. Everything can be approached from an aesthetic standpoint. Aesthetically interesting ways to move about can be found in most everyday situations. Our everyday mobility consists of various ways of getting about, and sometimes our approach to them is aesthetically colored. That we move in different ways and link them with aesthetic considerations of some sort is deeply rooted in our thinking. Our bodily experiences of the world are typically movement experiences, and our conceptual thinking is also built on them: We simply cannot make sense of the world without making use of conceptions of bodily movement

Variations on Artification

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most important aspects of the concept of artification. I will proceed through five main questions: (1) What does artification mean? (2) What can become artified? (3) Why does artification take place? (4) How can it manifest itself? (5) What kinds of things are accentuated in artification processes? The answers to these questions have a direct influence on how we understand artification’s real effects and those desired but not necessarily actual on both the things that become artified and on art itself. At the end of the article, I will put special emphasis on the question of what impact artification might have on art. My aim is to introduce and clarify conceptual tools for making sense of contemporary artification phenomena but I will also discuss some real-life cases that I think can be well understood by using the proposed concept

What is \u27Everyday\u27 in Everyday Aesthetics?

The theme of everyday aesthetics has recently been addressed by numerous authors. However, the question of what is actually the nature of the everyday, as contrasted with the non-everyday and how this nature affects the aesthetics of the everyday has not been sufficiently elaborated. The purpose of this essay is to clarify the everydayness of the everyday and combine the general notion of everydayness with the key points of everyday aesthetic