Philosophy of Art and Culture 2024-2025: Week 3

On Saito's Everyday Aeshetics

Aesthetics

• Philosophy of art in the West; is predominated by examinations of art objects or artefacts. Has broadened to include nature and pop culture.

• Misses the action-oriented.

• Audience as spectator, not actor.

Environmental Aesthetics

• Departure from established fine-arts aesthetics.

• It focuses on philosophical issues concerning appreciation of the world at large as it is constituted not simply by particular objects but also by environments themselves.

Japanese Aesthetics

• More grounded in everyday.

• A set of ancient ideals that include wabi (transient and stark beauty), sabi (the beauty of natural patina and aging), and yūgen (profound grace and subtlety)

The Feminism of Everyday Aesthetics

• Highlighting what was once neglected.

• The domain of the everyday and the domestic; traditionally feminine.

Aesthetic Life

• Set of sensory qualities that lead to gracefulness/forcefulness

• A special out-of-normal experience

• An attitude

• Our reaction

Deflationary Account

Noel Carroll: One could apprehend the aesthetic qualities of a work without scrutinizing its form or its aesthetic qualities.

Carroll’s Parameters of Aesthetic Quality

• formal structures aesthetic and/or expressive properties of the object,

• the emergence of those features from the base properties of the work

• the manner in which those features interact with each other

• cognitive, perceptual, emotive, and/or imaginative power of the subject

Criticism of Adorno

• Society is not a monolith.

• Contradictions persist even in manufactured artifacts.

• Even manufactured artifacts can be artistic.

Paradimatic Art

• Stable space-time-bound object

• Set apart from its surroundings

• Governed by implicit rules/assumptions.

• Separation, isolation, distinction.

Environmental Art

• The environment surrounding and accentuated by each constructed object is equally part of these artworks

• An interplay of the boundaries of space and finity; encourages sensation, imagination, and creativity

• Engagement in activism and eco politics

• Conclusion: Enlarges the definition/scope of art.

Art of the Everyday

• Involvement of our basic needs, breaking down of the boundary between two worlds and their rules.

• Rirkrit’s apartment/kitchen.

• Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project.

• Conclusion: Bringing/slamming two worlds together.

The Japanese Tea Ceremony

• Indefinite boundaries/parameters/variables.

• Impermanent. A happening that cannot be replicated.

• Celebrating mundanity

• Conclusion: Little beauty derived from an everyday practice.

Limitation of Expanded Art-Centered Aesthetics

• Heteronymy of art ruins the distinction between art and the everyday

• non-artists have a rich aesthetic knowledge/life, though they may not be aware of it

• Elevation of the ordinary is alienating it from context

• No flow

Distancing

A dramatic break from our humdrum experience; a "special" moment (Bullough)

Disinterest

Attending/assessing properly to a paradigmatic art (dewey)