Aesthetics As Space

A living environment that is perceived as aesthetically pleasant improves our quality of life, and we continuously assess the world we live in from this point of view. How things look, sound and feel clearly makes a difference. Are the surrounding objects, views, people, user interfaces and buildings beautiful, ugly, handsome or elegant? In addition to assessing our surroundings, we prefer doing and making things in such a way as to promote aesthetic appeal. We comb our hair, we furnish and decorate, we tune up our social media profiles and we create art for aesthetic reasons. Aesthetic values guide our choices and decisions when we are shopping, dining at the table, spending our time on holiday, voting in the polling booth or choosing a spouse. But what actually is aesthetics? Where and how does it exist? Is everybody's taste as good as anybody's? How does aesthetics relate to beauty, or art? How are the current megatrends, such as digitalization, molding aesthetics? Aesthetics as Space explores the aesthetic aspects of our life in the 21stcentury and addresses the question above, along with many others. There is no all-encompassing 21st-century aesthetics; rather, it is a multi-dimensional space of competing interpretations and ideas. This book gives the reader tools for understanding these different approaches.

A living environment that is perceived as aesthetically pleasant improves our quality of life, and we continuously assess the world we live in from this point of view. How things look, sound and feel clearly makes a difference. Are the surrounding objects, views, people, user interfaces and buildings beautiful, ugly, handsome or elegant?00In addition to assessing our surroundings, we prefer doing and making things in such a way as to promote aesthetic appeal. We comb our hair, we furnish and decorate, we tune up our social media profiles and we create art for aesthetic reasons. Aesthetic values guide our choices and decisions when we are shopping, dining at the table, spending our time on holiday, voting in the polling booth or choosing a spouse.00But what actually is aesthetics? Where and how does it exist? Is everybody's taste as good as anybody's? How does aesthetics relate to beauty, or art? How are the current megatrends, such as digitalization, molding aesthetics?00'Aesthetics as Space' explores the aesthetic aspects of our life in the 21st century and addresses the question above, along with many others. There is no all-encompassing 21st-century aesthetics; rather, it is a multi-dimensional space of competing interpretations and ideas. This book gives the reader tools for understanding these different approaches.

Mustafa Dikec reveals the aesthetic premises that underlie Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Ranciere's political thinking, and demonstrates how their politics depend on the construction and apprehension of worlds through spatial forms and distrib

Charting an 'aesthetic', post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin's art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century.

Geographical Aesthetics places the terms 'aesthetics' and 'geography' under critical question together, responding both to the increasing calls from within geography to develop a 'geographical aesthetics', and a resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in conceptual and empirical questions around geoaesthetics, environmental aesthetics, as well as the spatialities of the aesthetic. Despite taking up an identifiable role within the geographical imagination and sensibilities for centuries, and having what is arguably a key place in the making of the modern discipline, aesthetics remains a relatively under-theorized field within geography. Across 15 chapters Geographical Aesthetics brings together timely commentaries by international, interdisciplinary scholars to rework historical relations between geography and aesthetics, and reconsider how it is we might understand aesthetics. In renewing aesthetics as a site of investigation, but also an analytic object through which we can think about worldly encounters, Geographical Aesthetics presents a reworking of our geographical imaginary of the aesthetic.

In these closely argued essays, taking examples from writing and film, Arun Prabha Mukherjee considers the place of the third world person - both as artistic creator and as a subject of artistic eneavour - in the West. Works of non-mainstream, immigrant artists, she urges, shoul be understood on their own terms. In particular, established Western aethetics, especially the idea of the Universal and its applications, even within the domains of the postcolonial and feminist criticism, are demonstrated as instances of domination and disregard third world experiences and particularities. On the other hand, key canonical texts in the West, blind to these details of the third world lives they portray, are shown to be distortional and even offensive. This important work includes detailed and original considerations of the works of David Lean, Michael Ondaatje, MG Vassanji, Earle Birney, Rohinton Mistry, Neil Bissoondath, Dionne Brand, and numerous others.

The six essays presented in this volume afford the English-reading public the first serious and considered overview of the uniquely Germanic movements of psychological aesthetics and Kunstwissenschaft.

"In the Space Age," wrote Italian artist Lucio Fontana, "spatial art." Fontana's desire to create art in space came in response to unprecedented technological advances and contemporary fantasies of space travel. Fifteen years before Andy Warhol said he wanted to be as much a part of his times as rockets and television, Fontana's large-scale light-and-space installations became a short-lived but ultimately influential art-world phenomenon. The artists discussed in Space-Age Aesthetics looked beyond the limits of the picture, exploring space, mass media, pop culture, nuclear power, and science fiction to connect new art to the dramatic changes taking place through the encroaching Space Age. Space-Age Aesthetics begins by addressing the imagery of space exploration as a field of mythical representation informed by Cold War politics and acted out in an expansive variety of media, from the picture press to comic books. Through persuasive arguments that reveal the many-layered interconnections between the artists' aesthetics and theoretical responses to the dawn of an age of revolutionary technologies, this book offers new ways to think about the historical emergence of pop, conceptual, postmodern, and installation art and serves to fill the long-neglected gap in material on the post-World War II European avant-garde.