Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects (out February 2025)

Halsall et all eds. Special Edition of the “Journal of Visual Art Practice” Susan Best, ‘Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-aesthetic Tradition in late-modern art’ Anna Dezeuze, ‘Everyday life, “Relational Aesthetics”, and the “Transfiguration of the Common-Place”’ Riikka Haapalainen, ‘Contemporary Art and the Role of Museum as Situational Media’ Andy Hamilton, ‘Indeterminacy and Reciprocity: Contrasts and Connections between Natural and Artistic Beauty’ Joanna Lowry, ‘Putting Painting in the Picture (Photographically)’ Toni Ross, ‘Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics”’ William P. Seeley, ‘Naturalizing Aesthetics: Art and the Cognitive Neuroscience of Vision’ Jeremy Spencer, ‘Body and Embodiment in Modernist Painting’

Conference proceedings: chapters and papers from an international conference held at Liverpool Hope University 5th–8th June 2007. This was a wide-ranging inter-disciplinary conference which encouraged submissions from three general strands of study including; those subjects which have enjoyed a substantial history of involvement in the field such as Theology and Philosophy, those relatively new to the study such as Sports Studies and Management, and those which focus upon such applied dimensions as the Arts and Education. The overall aim of the conference was to learn from interdisciplinary debate and to encourage an exchange of ideas on research of the highest quality.

2008

Conference proceedings: chapters and papers from an international conference held at Liverpool Hope University 5th–8th June 2007. This was a wide-ranging inter-disciplinary conference which encouraged submissions from three general strands of study including; those subjects which have enjoyed a substantial history of involvement in the field such as Theology and Philosophy, those relatively new to the study such as Sports Studies and Management, and those which focus upon such applied dimensions as the Arts and Education. The overall aim of the conference was to learn from interdisciplinary debate and to encourage an exchange of ideas on research of the highest quality.

This paper traces the steps to social aesthetics as exemplified in four well-known paintings. It begins by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and the refinement of perceptual acuity in a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such appreciation, I propose the full participatory involvement in the experience of appreciation as expressed by the concept of aesthetic engagement. This can be shown by describing the appreciative situation as an aesthetic field in which the perceptual, creative, focusing, and activating factors are in reciprocal interaction, and it is seen clearly in appreciating personal, social, natural, and built environments. A social aesthetics exemplifies these environments in aesthetic engagement as shown by the gaze in the experience of the four paintings presented at the beginning.

Third text, 2007

2017

This essay traces the steps to social aesthetics. It begins by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and its refinement in the perceptual acuity of a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such appreciation, the present paper proposes the full participatory involvement in the experience of appreciation as expressed by the concept of aesthetic engagement. This describes the appreciative situation as an aesthetic field in which the perceptual, creative, focusing, and activating factors are in reciprocal interaction. It characterizes not only appreciation in the arts but occurs as well in appreciating natural, built, and social environments. Aesthetic engagement in social aesthetics is exemplified by the gaze in the experience of four well-known paintings I shall consider. Following these a series of related ideas are developed that lead to t...

After the alleged 'ends' of metaphysics, of history, and of art, aesthetics reorganises the field of its enquiry. While retaining the question of the meaning of art for the human as the background justification of its theorising, aesthetics meets philosophical anthropology and enlarges its field. Philosophical anthropology explains that the instability of the human condition demands culture as the artificial stabilisation of the human world as well as of the human in the world. Expressivity, artificiality, and the aesthetic are interweaved with the meaning of the human world. In this context, pictures have priority over concepts and justify art as the eminent pictorial form of meaning. Since the human lives in nature and culture, the stabilisation of its open world is possible through creation of spatial correlates and of objects as well. Thus, aesthetics does need to expand enquiry beyond the discourse on art, so that it includes the issues concerning the aesthetic character of the human world and its spatial correlates. While Wolfgang Welsch and Richard Shusterman argue for a revision of aesthetics, Joseph Margolis and Helmuth Plessner support the stronger dialogue between philosophical anthropology and aesthetics in different ways. Further, Arnold Berleant explores aesthetics of human space.

"A Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Approach of the (False) Dichotomy Subject-Object in Aesthetics. Dialogue Between Western Aesthetics, Sociology of Art and Non-Western Aesthetics" is a careful equilibrium between a form and content in the image of art and the æsthetic. The research starts with one question: What happened to the æsthetic in the sociological appropriation of art? The epistemological, theoretical and methodological problems raised by the interdisciplinary approach adopted are presented as a maze, a network of paths, to emphasise the complexity of the sociological and philosophical views bridged together. In the first route, the content is characterised, by analogy with Bruegel's Fall of the Rebel Angels, as a set of vertical tensions between theories reifying art in the social and theories that place the æsthetic in a kind of heaven or transcendental vision of art and æsthetics. This structure allows us to situate philosophical and sociological appropriations, including Marxist and interpretative ones, in French and English scientific literature. These approaches either describe the power of society over individuals or claim the determining power of the subject. They force us to question the level of autonomy left to humans to taste and act upon their society. We then move on to theories (hermeneutics, social phenomenology, post-modernism) that either fuse the subject with, or exclude it from its world. We conclude on the limits of the sociology of art, and the transcending aspect of social experiences. The second route explores the transcultural path of the middle way between subject and object, art and æsthetics, categories that opened in the first route. We present Dufrenne's phenomenology in conjunction with Japanese æsthetics, establishing the basis of a cross-cultural dialogue extending to the Indian concept of rasa. The vertical tensions of the first route dissolve in a form analogous to a mandala. The last stage is an invitation to experience and meditate on a Brancusi sculpture The First Cry to deepen the cognitive value of the journey and offer a "direct experience" to the reader. The conclusion draws the benefits of such a shift within scientific consciousness. The sociology of art cannot separate art from the æsthetic, because both contribute to the experience of life. To acknowledge the dual nature of human experience (grounded and transcendent, merciless yet poetic) is then a lucid acceptance of the human condition.

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics

Concepts of aesthetic relations are currently undergoing massive critique and potential reconfiguration. In some way or other, they all relate to the power structures vested in the aesthetic and its theoretical inheritance. In this contestation of the western canon, recent scholars have questioned basic aesthetic concepts like talent, disinterestedness, transparency, and universalist notions of the human by highlighting how such discourses are built upon and reinforce divisions of a racial and colonial nature. 1 Aesthetic relations, it seems, can no longer be confined to the classical relationship between an object and a subject. Neither can we solve the issue by a simple return to the broad understanding of aesthetics as aisthesis, as a general formula for sense perception, since such a conception still favors the singular experience of an autonomous self. The topic of this special volume of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics originated from a conference held at the University of Copenhagen in January 2021 hosted by the Art as Forum research center. The aim of the conference was not only to catch a glimpse of the status quo within artistic practices and aesthetic theory, but also to invite proposals for how new conceptualizations of relationality could be formulated in aesthetic, social, political, and historical contexts. Pivotal for the forms of these discussions was the setting they took place in: a worldwide lockdown due to an ongoing Covid-pandemic. While the health crisis exposed several structures of inequality in Denmark and many other places, it also coexisted with-or even revitalized-other significant movements across the globe. In 2020, the assassination of George Floyd led to a new surge of Black Lives Matters uprisings all over the world as well as global revolts against symbols of colonial heritage that assembled humans from near and far, high and low, and gave rise to wideranging debates over the role of aesthetics within social and political infrastructures and hierarchies. The simultaneity of revolts across the globe-from South Africa to Kalaallit Nunaatmade explicit how the lockdown had intensified our already growing dependency on digital infrastructures of communication. While the viral dissemination of slogans of anti-racism