Imperfectionist Aesthetics In Art And Everyday Life

This book presents interdisciplinary research on the aesthetics of perfection and imperfection. Broadening this growing field, it connects the aesthetics of imperfection with issues in areas including philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. The contributors to this volume argue that imperfection has value in being open and inclusive. The aesthetics of imperfection is typified by organic, unpolished production and the avoidance of perfect finish, instead representing living and natural change, and opposing the consumerist concern with the flawless and pristine. The chapters are divided into seven thematic sections. After the first section, on imperfection across the arts and culture, the next three parts are on imperfection in the arts of music, visual and theatrical arts, and literature. The second half of this book then moves to categories in everyday life and branches this further into body, self, and the person, and urban environments. Together, the chapters promote a positive ethos of imperfection that furthers individual and social engagement and supports creativity over mere passivity. Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, literature, music, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies.

The aesthetics of everyday life, originally developed by Henri Lefebvre and other modernist theorists, is an extension of traditional aesthetics, usually confined to works of art. It is not limited to the study of humble objects but is rather concerned with all of the undeniably aesthetic experiences that arise when one contemplates objects or performs acts that are outside the traditional realm of aesthetics. It is concerned with the nature of the relationship between subject and object. One significant aspect of everyday aesthetics is environmental aesthetics, whether constructed, as a building, or manipulated, as a landscape. Others, also discussed in the book, include sport, weather, smell and taste, and food.

As a new trend in aesthetics appearing concurrently in the West and the East in the last ten years, the aesthetics of everyday life points to a growing diversification among existing methodologies for pursuing aesthetics, alongside the shift from art-based aesthetics. The cultural diversity manifest in global aesthetics offers common ground for the collaborative efforts of aesthetics in both the West and the East. Given the rapidly growing interest and its potential for attracting new audiences extending beyond the more narrowly focused traditions of twentieth-century analytic and environmental aesthetics, it stands to command its own share of attention in the future of aesthetic studies. The aesthetics of everyday life has become a stream of thought with a global ambition. This interest has led to numerous systematic and in-depth works on this topic, some of which were conducted by the authors represented in this volume. A salient feature of this book is that it not only represents the recent developments of the aesthetics of everyday life in the West, but also highlights the interaction between scholars in the West and the East on this topic. Thus, the project is a contribution toward mutual progress in the collaboration between Western and Eastern aesthetics. What distinguishes this book from other anthologies and monographs on this topic is that it reconstructs the aesthetics of everyday life through cultural dialogue between the West and the East, with a view to building a new form of aesthetics of everyday life, as seen from a global perspective. At present, the aesthetics of everyday life as a newly emergent approach to aesthetics may encounter skepticism among aestheticians accustomed to the rigors of analytic philosophers who prefer to discuss aesthetics at the level of abstract concepts and argument, and who tolerate the particulars of experience mainly as illustrations. But, there is no reason to abandon the pursuit of the aesthetics of everyday life in the face of such objections. On the contrary, there are many benefits to gain in bringing aesthetics to bear on a wider sphere of human life, made possible through efforts to show the relevance of aesthetics to a broader range of human actions.

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

Joseph Kupfer removes aesthetics from the exclusive province of museums, concert halls, and the periphery of human interests to reveal the impact of aesthetic experience on daily living. He combines philosophical aesthetics and critical analysis to indicate the status of aesthetic values in ordinary life, showing how aesthetic qualities and relations contribute to social, moral, and personal values. In examining the practical implications of aesthetic values for sports, sexual relationships, violence, and education, Kupfer also looks at the effect of aesthetic deprivation.

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light on the field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today.

"This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as 'neat,' 'messy,' 'pretty,' 'lovely,' 'cute,' and 'pleasant.' The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday."--

This book analyses the epistemological problems that Shakespeare explores in Othello. In particular, it uses the methods of analytic philosophy, especially the work of the later Wittgenstein, to characterize these problems and the play. Shakespeare’s Othello is often thought to connect with traditional sceptical problems, and in particular with the problem of other minds. In this book, Richard Gaskin argues that the play does indeed connect in interesting—but also in surprising and so far relatively unexplored—ways with traditional epistemological concerns. Shakespeare presupposes a generally Wittgensteinian model of mind as revealed in behaviour, and communication as necessarily successful in general. Gaskin examines different epistemological models of the tragedy, and argues that it is useful to apply materials from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty to the analysis of Othello’s loss of confidence in Desdemona’s fidelity: Othello treats Desdemona’s fidelity as a ‘hinge certainty’, something that is so fundamental to the language-game that abandoning it results—so Wittgenstein predicts—in chaos and madness. The tragedy arises, Gaskin suggests, from treating the wrong kind of thing as a hinge certainty. Othello and the Problem of Knowledge will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of literature, Shakespeare, and Wittgenstein.

This book provides original descriptive accounts of two schools of thought in the philosophy of beauty: the 20th-century “Anti-Aesthetic” movement and the 21st-century “Beauty Revival” movement. It also includes a positive defence of beauty as a lived experience extrapolated from Beauty-Revival position. Beauty was traditionally understood in the broadest sense as a notion that engages our sense perception and embraces everything evoked by that perception, including mental products and affective states. This book constructs and places in parallel with one another the Anti-Aesthetic and Beauty-Revival movements. In the author’s view, Anti-Aestheticism is devoted to a decisive negation of beauty—denying its importance as a philosophical notion and its significance as a lived experience. It suggests that beauty is a merely sensual experience, which can be used, at best, as a distraction from justice and, at worst, as an instrument of evil. Alternatively, the Beauty-Revival movement advances arguments for beauty as an experience that extends primarily to sensual experience, but which also calls forth mental products and cognitive and affective states evoked by that experience. After reconstructing these two positions, the author elaborates on the notion of beauty as a lived experience through three key moments which occur in the process of our experiencing beautiful objects. These moments are (a) the conditions that constitute an experience of beauty, (b) the attitudinal features most likely to lead to the experience of beauty, and (c) the results of the experience of beauty. The Revival of Beauty will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, history of philosophy, and art history.

This book reads Alfred Hitchcock as a philosopher of what constitutes the erotic. The author argues that Hitchcock is doing a post-Nietzschean, postmodern kind of philosophy in which he is exploring and creating possibilities of what the erotic can feel like and how the erotic can be expressed. The erotic is a pervasive phenomenon in Hitchcock’s films. It involves irony, play, and sophistication, and there can be erotic failures as well as erotic successes. The erotic is most complexly explored by Hitchcock in his two masterpieces from the 1950s: Vertigo (1958), a story of the failure of the erotic, and North by Northwest (1959), in which the erotic is consummated in marriage. The author argues that Hitchcock has a philosophical theory about what makes the difference. It is a version of existential philosophy that understands what a person is to be based on what they make of themselves through their choices. The author argues that the erotic for Hitchcock is a process of mutual, reciprocal creation of the personality of the other person. This process is complicated by the fact that as one attempts to create the person one desires, one is simultaneously being created by that other person, and so what one desires is also in a process of being recreated in the mutual reciprocal dance of the erotic entanglement. There is a moral dimension to this because erotic failure is, in a way, a failure of the human, not in the sense of a human essence, but in the sense of realizing human possibilities that can make our lives more satisfying, complete, and full. Hitchcock as Philosopher of the Erotic will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophy of film, film studies, and philosophy of love and sex.