Everyday aesthetic experiences and concerns occupy a large part of our aesthetic life. However, because of their prevalence and mundane nature, we tend not to pay much attention to them, let alone examine their significance. Western aesthetic theories of the past few centuries also neglect everyday aesthetics because of their almost exclusive emphasis on art. In a ground-breaking new study, Yuriko Saito provides a detailed investigation into our everyday aesthetic experiences, and reveals how our everyday (...) aesthetic tastes and judgments can exert a powerful influence on the state of the world and our quality of life. By analysing a wide range of examples from our aesthetic interactions with nature, the environment, everyday objects, and Japanese culture, Saito illustrates the complex nature of seemingly simple and innocuous aesthetic responses. She discusses the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of the distinctive characters of objects or phenomena, responses to various manifestations of transience, and the aesthetic expression of moral values; and she examines the moral, political, existential, and environmental implications of these and other issues. (shrink)

Neglect of everyday aesthetics -- Significance of everyday aesthetics -- Aesthetics of distinctive characteristics and ambience -- Everyday aesthetic qualities and transience -- Moral-aesthetic judgments of artifacts.

This chapter will introduce everyday aesthetics and conceptions of happiness, explore their interconnections, and indicate some ways they might relate to depression. I introduce the main claims and concerns of everyday aesthetics and illustrate these with examples from the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophical traditions. I then consider two popular accounts of happiness – ‘hedonic’ and ‘life-satisfaction’ theories – and offer an alternative phenomenological account of happiness. Aesthetic appreciation and agency and happiness, it is argued, depend (...) on a phenomenologically fundamental capacity to experience different kinds of significant possibility. It is the loss or disruption of that capacity which characterises experiences of depression. (shrink)

The work is divided into five chapters. The first, “Neglect of Everyday Aesthetics,” speaks of the fact that although the question of aesthetics has been enriched and enlarged by objects long ignored, with notable design, aesthetics is essentially a discourse on art. This is problematic in the sense that many implications of our aesthetic judgment escape all problematic reflexion if we stay centered on art. The aesthetic activity brings ethic choices (to prefer this or that type (...) of environment) that are not included in the artistic appreciation; the problematic of artistic creation does not take into consideration the ordinary creation, such as arranging a garden, a space, or a living space. The second chapter is .. (shrink)

The essay addresses the issue of the relationships between everyday aesthetics and ethics from the point of view of tact. Tact is understood as an attitude towards behavior that guides action and thinking, and combines aesthetics with ethics. Tact and tactlessness may manifest themselves in action and speech but also in objects produced and used. I will argue that although tact is often pursued, tactful behavior will necessarily result in conflicting situations in which one is only in (...) step with certain things and in conflict with many others. However, the principle of tact tries to hide its conflictual aspects, unlike, for example, confrontation-based political thinking. Still, within the framework of tact, the contrast between pursuing harmonious behavior and yet necessarily creating conflicts cannot be avoided, which emphasizes the special tragic nature of tact. This kind of tragedy also often characterizes everyday aesthetics. I will approach the theme both through theoretical concepts and concrete examples. (shrink)

What is the role of aesthetics, everyday aesthetics in particular, in processes of solving social problems? Many if not most social problems arise from and affect our daily lives. As far as these problems contain aesthetic aspects, these typically are also of an everyday kind. In this paper, I address the relations between social problems and everyday aesthetics in five sections. I will start by briefly describing what I mean by social problems. Second, I (...) will outline what solving such problems means. Then, I will move on to defining aesthetics for the purposes of this article. Fourth, I will focus on the main question, the potential role of everyday aesthetics in solving social problems. Lastly, I will drill down a bit deeper into my own experiences in this matter in order to concretize the general points and give examples stemming from my working life. (shrink)

Everyday photographs as well as art photographs may be aesthetically appreciated. Although this may be most obvious in the case of advertising it is also true for amateur photographs. Non-art photographs play an important role in our everyday lives and should not be neglected by aesthetics. That these photographs draw much of their value from being associated with memories and musings does not make them non-aesthetic. I discuss these issues drawing on Clive Bell, Lyotard and Bourdieu with (...) special emphasis placed such contemporary art photographers as Nan Goldin and Ed Burtynsky. (shrink)

Leading international scholars present analysis and case studies from different cultural settings, East and West, exploring aesthetic interest and experience in our daily lives at home, in workplaces, using everyday things, in our built and natural environments, and in our relationships and communities. A wide range of views and examples of everyday aesthetics are presented from western philosophical paradigms, from Confucian and Daoist aesthetics, and from the Japanese tradition. All indicate universal features of human aesthetic lives (...) together with their cultural variations. Comparative Everyday Aesthetics is a significant contribution to a key trend in international aesthetics for thinking beyond narrow art-centered conceptions of the aesthetic. It generates global discussions about good, aesthetic, everyday living in all its various aspects. It also promotes aesthetic education for personal, social, and environmental development and presents opportunities for global collaborative projects in philosophical aesthetics. (shrink)

My aim is to argue that Jean Luc Nancy’s conception of _Being_ can be particularly valuable for underlining Everyday Aesthetics’ specificity and thus for revealing its philosophical worth, one that I believe is overshadowed when treating Everyday Aesthetics solely as an extension of traditional aesthetics. Nancy’s ontology is nevertheless rooted in the Heideggerian perspective of _Being_, and is thus seemingly opposite to an Anglo-American approach, which is the sort of ground that Everyday Aesthetics (...) seems to rely on. This paper will be divided into three parts: first, I discuss what separates Everyday Aesthetics from the European approach – Heidegger included – and why this rupture is legitimate. Secondly, I present what I consider to be the strongest philosophical points that Everyday Aesthetics puts forward. Finally, I show why Nancy’s work, in its specific way of challenging Western thought, can make a considerable contribution to Everyday Aesthetics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce everyday aesthetics in education. First, it presents everyday aesthetics as a subdiscipline within philosophical aesthetics, that revisits sensory perception as the backdrop of all experience, claims ordinary life is a proper venue for aesthetic inquiry, and problematizes the impact aesthetic preferences have on habitual decisions. Second, the paper argues that among the diverse matters students learn in school, they learn—explicitly or implicitly—what and how to perceive, as well (...) as the pedagogical purposes of daily perception. School models the relationships that students will develop between what they perceive, what they think about it, and how they act accordingly. Next, the paper elaborates on the notions of “school aesthetic matrixes” and “space and place in school”. School aesthetic matrixes refer to perceptual patterns that allow characterizing relationships between daily perception and the pedagogical project of a school. They manifest through expressions such as prison school, home school, mall school, etc. Space and place in school allude to concomitant experiences, of corporeal basis, that allow describing how we inhabit the world. What distinguishes them is the approach each one gives to the senses and the body. The paper concludes by calling attention to the comprehension and role of perception in education, urging to mind the aesthetic-pedagogical character that students develop throughout 12 years of schooling. Ultimately, the key relationships we develop with ourselves, others, and the world, entail a basic perceptual dimension that can be educated to become more purposefully and integrally present in life. (shrink)

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations ha ve serious consequences which determine the quality of life (...) and the state ofthe world, for better or worse. This power ofthe aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a norma ti ve dimension to everyday aesthetics, 1 argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse. (shrink)

The paper examines the intercultural dimension of everyday aesthetics which was promoted by one of its most important Chinese proponents Liu Yuedi as a search for dialogue between various aesthetic traditions, in particular, those from the East and West. The aim of the paper is to explore some parallels between the traditional Chinese and contemporary Western aesthetic sensibilities, by looking for their common values and concepts which are gaining prominence in the discourse of everyday aesthetics. It (...) begins with a survey of the contributions of Chinese and Western scholars; the survey concerns the relevance of Chinese traditional aesthetics for everyday aesthetics, and examines particular features of the nature of perception in everyday aesthetics which is common to Chinese and Western artistic activities, aesthetic discourses and their conceptualizations. In the second section I discuss the “intercultural” concept of atmosphere as the de-personalized or “transpersonal”/intersubjective, vague and all-inclusive experience of the situational mood and environmental wholeness. I explore and compare the reflection of its characteristics in Western scholarship and Chinese aesthetics, especially in regard to the aural perception and sonic sensibility. The final section provides a comparative analysis of few examples of the integration of music into the environmental or everyday surrounding—in Daoist philosophy and Chinese everyday aesthetics, and Western avant-garde art. The analysis is concentrated on the perception of music in relation to the experience of atmosphere and everyday aesthetics, as they were defined in the previous sections. The paper challenges the “newness” of everyday aesthetics, especially if it is viewed from the intercultural perspective, and proposes the separation of its discourses into the investigation of its past and present. (shrink)

As opposed to Melchionne and Naukkarinen, I defend an expansive definition of everyday aesthetics, one that includes festivals, tourism, and many daily activities of artists and other professionals, along with most ordinary and common experiences. I argue for continuities between aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art and nature. Looking through a window, for example, may involve aspects of all three. Although I agree with Melchionne that everyday aesthetics is closely related (...) to questions of subjective well-being, I take a more expansive approach to this, drawing from recent psychological studies of the experience of “awe” to stress the importance of such experiences in subjective well-being, thus tying the high points of everyday aesthetics more closely with the high points in the aesthetics of art and nature. (shrink)

This article discusses Everyday Aesthetics seen from philosophical hermeneutics where aesthetics is understood as a form of knowledge. Two approaches are made, one concerning content, i.e. the knowledge made apparent to us in the aesthetic situation which is usually, but not exclusively, an exception to the everyday; another concerning the appearance of knowledge in form which, likewise, is also in danger of becoming isolated from the everyday. Everyday Aesthetics is reviewed through the same (...) two approaches to understand how it differs from hermeneutics and where possible exchanges between them appear. (shrink)

I argue that our everyday evaluations of architecture are primarily evaluations of spaces and, in particular, of their inhabitability— that is, whether they serve or can serve to the realization of our individual ideal of life. Inhabitability is not only a functional criterion but an aesthetic one as well. It is aesthetic insofar as the evaluations about inhabitability include evaluations about the quality of the experience of actually doing something in —or simply occupying—a particular space. This aesthetic aspect of (...) our everyday evaluations explains, on one hand, the distinctive features of our everyday preferences for some architectonic spaces over others—namely, their very personal nature; their noticeable value in our daily lives; their inseparability from the activities we plan to realize in those spaces; and the importance of the spaces which are contiguous to the one we are evaluating. And on the other, it both reveals architecture’s significance for the quality of our daily life and serves as a guide for us to choose spaces that improve that quality. (shrink)

Although the first ‘pragmatist aesthetics’ was devised by John Dewey in his Art as Experience, Richard Shusterman has been the only scholar to use the notion of “pragmatist aesthetics” in his Pragmatist Aesthetics. In this paper, I show that Dewey already refuses the gap between the practices of the ‘artworld’ and that of everyday life. In Art as Experience, he criticizes the ‘museum conception’ of art to argue that some aesthetic experiences in our daily life have (...) the same essential structure as the experience of art. While Rorty has revised Dewey’s basic premises, Shusterman has rather restated them. Since the end of the 1980s, he has started developing his own philosophical project, named ‘somaesthetics’. Shusterman’s somaesthetics does not simply incorporate many Deweyan views, but also develops them further. Accepting a Deweyan framework, Shusterman rejects the sharp dualism of the so-called “lower and higher levels of art”. What is more, he considers philosophy as an art of the living, embracing in somaesthetics the ancient Greek and Asian traditions. (shrink)

This paper defends two claims. First, we will argue for the existence of aesthetic demands in the realm of everyday aesthetics, and that these demands are not reducible to moral demands. Second, we will argue that we must recognise the limits of these demands in order to combat a widespread form of gendered oppression. The concept of aesthetic supererogation offers a new structural framework to understand both the pernicious nature of this oppression and what may be done to (...) mitigate it. (shrink)

This interview covers topics related to Everyday Aesthetics and confirms the multi-faceted, rich and inclusive environment surrounding Nino Migliori,1 both as a human being and as a photographer. In particular, the experience from some of his workshops reveal how such concepts as space and time, playing and experiencing, amplify and broaden the classic definition of Everyday Aesthetics provided by field literature.2 More generally, this approach also provides a cue to conduct an aesthetic analysis that is free (...) from judgments in taste. This means considering Migliori’s photographic gesture within an everyday life aesthetic perspective and proposing that it is analyzed along a pragmatic course. Therefore, pragmatism-related observations are here brought forward to provide research insights within the nature of Everyday Aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper discusses some essays from London daily journals at the time of the emergence of modern aesthetics and attempts to demonstrate that what we nowadays call “everyday aesthetics” was not simply present in the relevant texts of the early eighteenth century, but, in a sense, it was the mainstream of the rising modern aesthetic. The aesthetic basically meant paying closer attention to our everyday reality including our natural and human made environments and also various quotidian (...) activities. Contemporary everyday aesthetics should therefore be seen not so much as an extension of the mostly “art-centred” post-Kantian philosophical aesthetics, but rather as one of the original, pre-Kantian, sources of modern aesthetics to be restored or regained. (shrink)

This ground-breaking book brings to life a neglected topic: our everyday aesthetic interactions with the world around us and the objects in it. Yuriko Saito shows how exploring everyday aesthetics can enrich the content of our aesthetic discourse, and reveals the its influence on the state of the world and our quality of life.

Everyday Aesthetics was born in the 21 st Century as a sub-discipline of Anglo-American Aesthetics and it has spread in the international debate. However, the contribute of historical perspective has not properly explored yet. Is it possible to trace the history of everyday aesthetics before the official birth of this discipline? I will try and give an affirmative answer by focusing on an exemplary category: that of the decorum. Using the history of ideas, I will (...) analyse the Greek concept of prepon and the similar Latin concepts of decorum which express the idea of ‘convenience’ or ‘fitness to purpose’ in the ethical and rhetorical sphere. Later I will analyse the evolution of the concept of decorum in the theory of Ancient and Renaissance architecture (Vitruvius, Leon Battista Alberti). My goal is to demonstrate that in Ancient and Renaissance culture decorum is a category that refers to the objects and practices of everyday life but also a principle that regulates appropriate behaviour in the sphere of good manners. Consequently, given its pervasiveness in the different areas of everyday life, the concept of decorum can be a paradigmatic example to trace the history of everyday aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical assessment of two diverse methodological approaches in the contemporary movement of Everyday Aesthetics. The “weak formulation” asserts that ordinary objects are best understood on the model of fine art. I counter this claim with a distinction between aesthetic and artistic value. The “strong formulation” develops an ethical-existential theory of the everyday as one of belonging and familiarity which nevertheless causes us to lose what is uniquely aesthetic about our ordinary lives. I strive (...) to find a middle ground that contextualizes the aesthetic within human activities, concerns and judgements. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the notion of experience, whose conceptual analysis seems to be often neglected or at least not sufficiently made explicit in the current discourse on Everyday Aesthetics. In our investigation this notion will be tackled, in particular, through the lens of such concepts as _Erlebnis, Erfahrung_, and _Lebenswel_t, which are drawn from the continental philosophical tradition. Purpose of the paper is to present a provisional framework aimed at clarifying that a more accurate conceptualization of experience (...) allows for a better contemporary reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. (shrink)

There is a bifurcation between shenghuo meixue and everyday aesthetics – the two discourses often seen as forming the same trend in contemporary aesthetics concurrently happening in the East and the West. The disparity can be observed from the critical reflection on everydayness, the recognition of negative aesthetic qualities and experience, and the expectation of defamiliarisation. I suggest that in the Neo-Confucian practice of gewu or investigating things, one may find another Chinese inspiration for dealing with the (...) familiar, ordinary, and routine aesthetically. Gewu offers another possibility of “experiencing the ordinary as ordinary”. It can lead to an aesthetical immersive experience, characterised by a sensuous and intuitive recognition of the appropriateness of everyday things dwelling in their contexts, as well as a cosmic understanding of generative power of the universe that is both profound and poetic. By contemplating aesthetic experience facilitated by gewu, I argue that aesthetic experience is typically not individual per se, but collective in the sense that many prima facie private and personal aesthetic experiences are possible only because of the collective underneath. (shrink)

Everyday aesthetics is a new sub-discipline of aesthetic theory that has only been actively discussed since the 1980s. This paper addresses what many consider the central issue of the field, called “the dilemma of everyday aesthetics.” I discuss three authors who address this issue: Yuriko Saito, Allen Carlson, and Paisley Livingston. Drawing on Dewey’s anti-dualist stance, I argued for a continuity between the aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art. In course (...) of my discussion, I question such dichotomies as that between the practical and the aesthetic, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and disinterestedness vs. engagement. In my view, the dilemma is only real for those who wish to maintain relatively rigid distinctions within these dichotomies. The dilemma is only a dilemma if you think there is something disturbing about the thought that low-level aesthetic experiences are enhanced when attended to and when understood or appreciated differently by way of the arts. (shrink)

During the past few decades, everyday aesthetics has established itself as a new branch of philosophical aesthetics alongside the more traditional philosophy of art. The Paths from Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics explores the intimate relations between these two branches of contemporary aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume discuss a wide range of topics from aesthetic intimacy to the nature of modernity and the essence of everydayness, which play important roles both in (...) the philosophy of art and everyday aesthetics. With these essays, the writers and editors of this volume wish to commemorate professor Arto Haapala on his 60th birthday. -/- This collection of articles is intended for scholars and students working in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and art studies. (shrink)

Emerged as a new philosophical trend, Everyday Aesthetics shifts focus from Arts to daily practices and objects. However, its historical dimension remains relatively unexplored. Adopting a historical approach inspired by Tatarkiewicz, this paper addresses this gap by examining the notions of home care in the thoughts of Greek philosophers Socrates and Xenophon. Analyzing Xenophon’s works reveals how ancient concepts of order and beauty apply to daily life, enriching contemporary Everyday Aesthetics discussions on cleanliness and domestic care.

Intercultural Approaches between Europe and China via Art? -/- Two landscapes from different cultures, Europe and China, that are both considered masterpieces are the focus of a study by Martina Sauer. To what extent are they each perceived as beautiful? Can the differences in aesthetic understanding tell us something about the respective cultures? Do the results have the potential to contribute to intercultural rapprochement between Europe and China? The possibility that these ideas can be fruitful for intercultural connections and understanding, (...) and for a re-evaluation of the interaction between humans and nature, is considered and analysed using the tools and theory of vitality semiotics (VS). -/- The task is examined by taking up premises from the philosophy of emotions by Sabine A. Döring, from the art history by Heinrich Wölfflin, from the infant research by Daniel N. Stern and from the empirical research in neuroscience on vitality forms by the research group around Giacomo Rizzolatti. -/- Cf. Martina Sauer, Vitality Semiotics: The Ever Beautiful and Its Potential for an Intercultural Approach: In Atmospheric Design and Everyday Aesthetics, edited by David Brubaker & Zhuofei Wang [Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 12, 2024]: 1-11. (shrink)

In the relatively fragmented field of everyday aesthetics, some issues have gradually become the subject of increasingly heated debate. One of the primary disputes concerns aesthetic experience and how that concept should be understood. This article defends the view that the conception of aesthetic experience developed by John Dewey offers a much more promising foundation for a theory on the aesthetics of everyday life than some scholars have believed.

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I (...) also question the limits of somaesthetics and Shusterman’s rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary. (shrink)

This study looks at the emerging branch of everyday aesthetics from the perspective of the fracture which exists in its core, as a result of the double reading of the everyday: the first, which elevates it to the realm of the extraordinary and the second, in which it remains strictly ordinary. Our purpose here is to repair this fracture by turning to David Hume’s functionalist aesthetics, where disinterest and utility are reconciled through sympathy and the affective (...) experience of otherness that it provides. Once transferred to the everyday sphere, sympathy facilitates understanding between these two versions, since the aesthetic appreciation of everyday objects or common activities requires, like the second version, that they remain in the practical environment and, like the first, to see something special in them, which is the possibility of one’s own or another’s well-being. (shrink)

Gumbrecht’s Heidegger-inspired book, _Production of Presence_, provides valuable tools for resolving issues in everyday aesthetics. Gumbrecht distinguishes between “presence cultures” and “interpretation cultures.” (Gumbrecht 2004) We live in an interpretation culture, and yet even in our culture there are presence effects. Gumbrecht understands aesthetic experience in terms of the idea of presence. His paradigms are great works of art and great athletic events, all of which take us away from the everyday. I argue that his theory can (...) be adapted, ironically, to everyday aesthetics, in particular to the experience of taking a walk. Much of what we experience aesthetically while taking a walk is experienced in the mode of silence. But, as Gumbrecht observes, there is an oscillation between presence effects and interpretation effects in aesthetic experience. I see that oscillation as something more like a dialectic. I also bring Plato’s theory of beauty and Danto’s theory of the artworld into this discussion. (shrink)