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.

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.

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 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 develops an original theory of performative beauty. Philosophical aesthetics has largely neglected one’s own actions as a potential experience of the beautiful. Throughout the book, the author uses his own experiences of Argentine tango as a case study; one important incentive for social dancing is to have pleasurable and beautiful experiences. This book begins by investigating the methodological causes for why beauty in modernity has been seen to result only from contemplating external objects. It then builds a theory of performative beauty that incorporates findings from new phenomenology, neuroaesthetics, enactivism, and somaesthetics and that reassesses existing inquiries of beauty. The result is an account that identifies kinaesthetic awareness as the point of emergence of both theory and practice, of creation (poiesis) and perception (aisthesis), and of moving (agency) and being moved (reception). Performative beauty is the pleasure of being moved by the dance where the dancer feels both as a creative improvisor and as an integrated part of the activity itself. A Somaesthetics of Performative Beauty—Tangoing Desire and Nostalgia will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in aesthetics, dance studies, performance studies, and related fields of artistic research. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.