This article seeks to investigate art in public urban space via a process of activating aesthetics as a way of enhancing pedagogies of engagement. It does this firstly by addressing the question of aesthetics in Enlightenment and twentieth-century frames; then it seeks to understand how artworks may be approached ontologically and epistemologically. The discussion works with the philosophical lenses of two different thinkers: Heidegger, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, and Marxist sociologist, Bourdieu with (...) his work on a theory of practice and habitus. It asks how art may work in the meaning-making processes of place and the human subject in terms of ontological difference and dispositional capital. In bringing these different organising principles of interpretation to specific works of art, the discussion draws from locational research undertaken in Newcastle/gateshead and Melbourne. (shrink)

In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully differentiating “aesthetic” judgment from other types of judgment, and, as such, we aim to question the assumption that aesthetic judgment does in fact constitute a distinctive kind of judgment (...) that is in need of, or can be subject to, distinctive theorizing. We advance our argument primarily through demonstrating that leading contemporary accounts of aesthetic judgment do not successfully distinguish a type of judgment in that they do not tell us how making an aesthetic judgment differs substantially from judging that 2 + 3 = 5, that football is entertaining, or that today is Tuesday. (shrink)

Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information”. Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds. More recently, cumulative cultural evolution has taken on this distinguishing role. CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of (...) cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual. Mesoudi and Thornton define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-human animals that places emphasis on some performance measure of traits increasing over time. They suggest this emphasis is also pertinent to cultural products in the aesthetic domain, but is this the case? Music, art and dance evolve over time, but can we say they gain beneficial modifications that increase their aesthetic value? Here we bring together perspectives from philosophy, musicology and biology to build a conceptual analysis of this question. We summarise current thinking on cumulative culture and aesthetics across fields to determine how aesthetic culture fits into the concept of CCE. We argue that this concept is problematic to reconcile with dominant views of aesthetics in philosophical analysis and struggles to characterise aesthetic cultures that evolve over time. We suggest that a tension arises from fundamental differences between cultural evolution in aesthetic and technological domains. Furthermore, this tension contributes to current debates between reconstructive and preservative theories of cultural evolution. (shrink)

It is a noteworthy disanalogy between contemporary ethics and aesthetics that the fitting-attitude account of value, so prominent in contemporary ethics, sees comparatively little play in aesthetics. The aim of this paper is to articulate what a systematic fitting-attitude-style framework for understanding aesthetic value might look like. In the bulk of the paper, I sketch possible fitting-attitude-style accounts of three central aesthetic values – the beautiful, the sublime, and the powerful – so that the general form of the framework come (...) through. (shrink)

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the influential concept of aesthetic experience has been strongly criticized by powerful voices both in analytic philosophy and in continental theory, sometimes to the point of rejecting its significance for art or even to denying its very existence. Nonetheless, it stubbornly reasserts itself as central to understanding art's meaning and value. Philosophical critique of aesthetic experience takes multiple forms. Theorists seeking a definition of art generally reject aesthetic experience as inadequate for this (...) task because it is both too wide and too narrow. Aesthetic experience surely occurs beyond the limits of art, as in our encounter with natural beauty, but it... (shrink)

I argue, contra Mohan Matthen, that at least some aesthetic pleasures arising from the appreciation of aesthetic features of artworks are what he calls ‘r-pleasures’ as opposed to ‘f-pleasures’—and moreover, that the paradigm aesthetic pleasure appears to be an r-pleasure on Matthen's terms. I then argue that talk of r- and f-pleasures does not distinguish different kinds, but two different features of pleasure; so this supposed distinction cannot be used to characterize a sui generis aesthetic pleasure.

Do epistemic and aesthetic values ever conflict? The answer might appear to be no, given that background knowledge generally enhances aesthetic experience, and aesthetic experience in turn generates new knowledge. As Keats writes, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats, 1996). Contra this line of thought, I argue that epistemic and aesthetic values can conflict when we over-rely on aesthetically enhancing background beliefs. The true and the beautiful can pull in different directions, forcing us to choose between flavours of normativity.

En este texto se presenta una lectura crítica de las definiciones de arte que lo vinculan de modo necesario con las propiedades estéticas. Se analizan los elementos centrales de los que dependen estas definiciones y se muestra su carácter problemático. Asimismo, se hace patente su vinculación con algunos intentos de ofrecer un enfoque intercultural y universalista de las artes y se concluye que, si bien las propiedades estéticas tienen una gran importancia en la teorización sobre las artes, es necesario tomarlas (...) no tanto como elementos esenciales cuanto como propiedades en sentido aristotélico. (shrink)

After briefly noting key contemporary critiques of aesthetic experience, this article revisits its original account in Plato’s theory of aesthetic experience as the madness of divine possession and then Aristotle’s response of defending art’s rationality as poiesis, which largely dominates the ensuing aesthetic tradition. I subsequently explore how the mysterious notion of possession continues to surface in important modern accounts of aesthetic experience (e. g. in Theodor W. Adorno, T. S. Eliot, John Dewey) and explain how the supernatural idea of (...) possession could find a naturalistic explanation that integrates the concepts of artworld, habitus and atmosphere. The article then exemplifies this naturalistic explanation through an analysis of the possession experience pertaining to performance art as documented in The Adventures of the Man in Gold. (shrink)

In this paper I examine a set of exceptional aesthetic experiences that remove us from our pragmatic everyday life and involve a specific type of unaffordability. I then extend this notion of unaffordability to experiences of awe and its relation to the sublime. My analysis is guided by considerations of the phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach that supports an affordance-based accounts of aesthetic experience. I review some recent neurophenomenological studies of the experience of awe, and I then sketch out a phenomenology (...) of awe as it approaches the sublime. (shrink)

In The Aesthetic Function of Art, I was mainly concerned to show how my “new aestheticism” can meet standard objections to aestheticism, but I have come to realize that, since it is as much a new institutionalism as it is a new aestheticism, its institutionalist aspect requires defense as much as its aestheticist aspect does. In this article, I show how a judicious aestheticizing of George Dickie's second version of the institutional theory of art, incorporating fundamental features of my own (...) view, can meet what seems to me to be the most serious objection to institutionalism in general, the dilemma famously proposed by Richard Wollheim. (shrink)