Aesthetics is the Philosophy of Our Wordless World

For too long, philosophers have tried to force our world to comport to the ‘linguistic turn,’ made famous by Richard Rorty’s 1967 anthology of the same name. And as time marches on, we seem to have even fewer tools at our disposal to carve out alternative views, even though philosophers as varied as Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty once discerned our world quite differently. Aesthetics remains the philosophical field where language need not occupy center court. For this reason, Aesthetics matters more than those Realists, who are prone to dismiss non-evidential views, might admit.

Your Tongue Here (Or Not): On Imagining Whether To Take a Bite (Or Not)

Inspired by recent visits to the Disgusting Food Museum (DFM) in Mälmo, SE and “FOOD: Bigger than Your Plate” (2019) at the Victoria & Albert in London, UK, this article explores the saliency of “disgust” given its role in the “attention economy,” hipster allure and emotional encoding. Initially appalled by the DFM’s demonizing national delicacies as disgusting, the author soon realised that doing so has a “silver lining” in terms of attention. One aspect that remains under-explored is the connection between imagination and attention. The relationship between taste and disgust grants us a vehicle for working this out, since human beings are wired for disgust, yet what disgusts is learnt. Unlike basic emotions for which we have salience and/or memories, we deploy our imagination to anticipate disgust. To defeat disgust’s alarmist ploys, “food adventurers” must block their imagination. “Disgusting food” not only grabs people’s attention, but it tends to deceive

Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016

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What's so authentic about restoration?

When shown two identical works of art, and told that one is the original and the other an artist-sanctioned copy, most viewers claim that they prefer the ‘original’, precisely because they imagine that something of the artist’s hand remains. Knowing full well that most everything that is old, yet still exists, has undergone some form of restoration, we are surprised that some philosophers still share viewers’ preference for some original over its sanctioned copy, as if they too believe that something of the artist’s hand remains, even if paint molecules have chipped off or surfaces have been (unbeknownst to them) routinely reworked. As the contributors to this volume of Aesthetic Investigations reiterate, restoration and its multiple variants, which range from preservation (preserving as is) to conservation (preventing further deterioration), is a fact of the matter

Tourism & the Built Environment

This paper explores the differences in ‘affect’ between Gehry’s blossoming beacons, whose visibility in the landscape lends them the role of beckoning flowers and the comparable invisibility of Floriade Expo 2022, whose horizontality granted it a subtlety that has thus far failed to elicit any of the thrill associated with the 'Bilbao Effect', even though it proffers an unparalleled botanical paradise. Thus far, it seems that people find biodiverse parks less impressive than buildings, even though thousands of people have worked tirelessly to ensure its viability. One year later, however, people are revaluating flower shows' ecological costs

Enacting Gifts: Performances on Par with Art Experiences

Given the coterie of philosophers focused on everyday aesthetics, it's fascinating that gift reception has heretofore managed to escape their scrutiny. To enact a gift, recipients begin by imagining its use. On this level, gifts serve as a litmus test. In luring us, we're taken out of our normal ways of being to experience a different side of ourselves. Enacting a gift is thus a kind of performance, whose value depends on the donee’s interpretation, just as exhibitions, concerts, staged plays or books are performances of visual art, scores, scripts or texts, whose interpretations demonstrate their aesthetic value. To develop the relationship between enacting gifts and performing artworks, I begin by surveying junctures along the gift-event’s arc: reply, imagination, trust, recognition, transformation and memory. Transformations arising from agonistic gifts strike me as significant because they characterise the way gifts challenge our beliefs, eventually altering our values. That we grow to love gifts, which we originally rejected out of hand, casts doubt on self-knowledge. Enacted gifts handily challenge self-knowledge’s twin features: authority and transparency. As this paper indicates, gift reception helps both to understand ourselves better and to remove the obstacles to what Quassim Cassim calls Substantive Self-Knowledge.

What’s so authentic about restoration?

When shown two identical works of art, and told that one is the original and the other an artist-sanctioned copy, most viewers claim that they prefer the ‘original’, precisely because they imagine that something of the artist’s hand remains. Knowing full well that most everything that is old, yet still exists, has undergone some form of restoration, we are surprised that some philosophers still share viewers’ preference for some original over its sanctioned copy, as if they too believe that something of the artist’s hand remains, even if paint molecules have chipped off or surfaces have been (unbeknownst to them) routinely reworked. As the contributors to this volume of Aesthetic Investigations reiterate, restoration and its multiple variants, which range from preservation (preserving as is) to conservation (preventing further deterioration), is a fact of the matter

‘Used and Amused’

On the occasion of this special issue focused on Models and Sitters, I am presenting what Dawn Kanter (in this issue) terms a 'textual account of the sitter'. With this in mind, I revisit a particular era in my life (primarily 1993-1999) when I regularly served as a model, muse, performer, poseur, and sitter. In fact, there was sufficient material to organise 'Used and Amused' (2000), an exhibition focused on ten collaborations, for which I typically self-improvised. Rather than simply detail these events, I've woven various ideas developed by each of this special issue's contributors into this article, so that my narrative here augments their papers

Emotion and Empirical Aesthetics

The rise in neuroaesthetics laboratories across the globe has led to scores of experiments designed to grasp people’s emotional, cognitive and perceptual responses to artworks, yet few researchers have studied spectators experiencing visual art in actual exhibitions. In 2015, Volker Kirchberg and Martin Tröndle published the results of their five-year experiment, whereby they mapped the physiological, social, psychological and aesthetic experiences of ‘600 diverse persons with a designed exhibition of classic modern and contemporary art as part of the Swiss national research project eMotion’. Their study’s most counter-intuitive discovery is the negligible role played by emotional response for those most engaged with artworks, that is, those spectators who regularly assess, evaluate and judge artworks. Given that not all appreciative attitudes reflect emotional responses, this paper argues that it would behoove researchers to study artworks that literally ‘move us’, causing us to take action, shift perspectives and adopt new values