The Aesthetic Paradox of Tourism

how is it possible to reconcile the detached attitude that typically characterizes aesthetic appreciation with the nature of everyday routine? In this paper, the dilemma is addressed by considering cultural tourism as a paradigmatic case of aesthetic appreciation of the ordinary. By examining the aesthetic motivations that animate cultural tourism, the study shows that, while seeking authenticity in the 'un-touristed', tourists remain trapped in their own, detached, 'tourist gaze'. The analogy between the dilemma of everyday aesthetics and the aesthetic paradox of tourism allows for the application to the latter of the strategies that have been put forward to solve the former. What emerges is that, whereas approaches that rely on aesthetic detachment reproduce the dilemma, those that insist on the aesthetic value of the ordinary 'as such' offer tourists a way out of the paradox. Nonetheless, effective as they seem in mitigating the risk of frustration that may derive from touristic activities, these approaches appear to reduce the aesthetic to an extremely thin notion, thereby weakening their own theoretical strength.

Popular Inquiry , 2021

As renown, one main aim of everyday aesthetics is to widen the scope of traditional Western aesthetics beyond the realms of fine arts and nature, so as to uncover the aesthetic potential of the varied phenomena that constitute people's daily life. Tourism and traveling, however, have so far received comparatively little theoretical treatment in the everyday aesthetics literature. This paper attempts to make up for this lack by presenting tourism as a proper object of aesthetic research. Unearthing the aesthetic motivations that animate so-called cultural tourism, it shows that, while searching for 'authenticity' in the visited destination tourists remain trapped in their own, detached, 'tourist gaze'. In order to reconcile this contradiction, we appeal to the theoretical tools provided by everyday aesthetics. After discussing and discarding approaches based on defamiliarization and distancing, we exploit strategies that rely on the adoption of an engaged aesthetic attitude. We conclude by suggesting that the engagement paradigm turns the tourist gaze into a mindful and embodied relation to the visited environment or cultural habit, thereby offering the visitor a chance to appreciate the place's quotidian life while at the same time ensuring aesthetic fulfillment.

ENVIRON PLANN D, 2009

This paper seeks to renegotiate the role of visuals and visual practice within the tourist experience. Embracing recent developments in tourist studies, I seek to move from understanding tourism as a series of predetermined, linear and static stages through which we pass to be a tourist. In doing so, I explore the ways in which visuals in particular photography and subsequent visualities, enliven tourists' becoming through a multiplicity of fluid and dynamic performances, practices and processes. Influenced by research by authors such as , I suggest photography is not merely an empty practice, but rather lights up the tourist experience. The emerging dynamics of visual practice renegotiate new understandings between tourists and place to establish a series of conceptual moments that outline photography as: political artefacts, reflexive performances, the imagination of space, embodied visualities and ethical prompts. Such conceptualisations and practices of tourist photography are by no means arbitrary, but are situated in a framework of visuality that highlights key moments of anticipation, rewriting and remembrance and reliving. Thus, moving beyond notions of the hermeneutic cycle of travel, photographs and photography are understood as complex performative spaces that extend beyond divisible boundaries of the before, during and after travel experiences and infiltrate the entire tourist experience.

2008

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the tourist, like the vagabond or flâneur, as a marginal figure, until in the post-modern world it moved to the centre of a world 'fully and exclusively structured by aesthetic criteria'. 1 This paper is concerned wiith the last decades of the nineteenth century, an era when tourists were relatively common features of the urban landscape and the tourism industry became one of the agencies generating economic and social change. Tourism became taken for granted as more and more people incorporated tourist practices into their everyday lives, even if these only extended to local sight sightseeing. 2 Tourism as an activity belongs in the public sphere. Tourist practices help to produce places while being the product of the discursive structures determining the way that places are imaged and experienced. Not surprisingly therefore, a major influence on ways of modelling the relationship between tourists and their environment has been the use of a dramaturgical metaphor in that it gives scope for the analysis of tourism as a social and cultural institution from a number of different perspectives. My presentation will deal with some visual examples. By the end of the century tourists were extremely visible in the principal cities of Europe, though not of course, in the numbers we associate with the next century, but significant none the less. The more important resorts and capital cities were crowded with tourists and even small towns, unknown to foreigners, were noted in Baedeker and represented on postcards. In thriving cultural centres new restaurants and cafés, opera houses, theatres, concert halls were attractive to tourists as well as local residents. The everyday life of major tourist centres became an object of touristic interest and its more distinctive features incorporated into the way that places were presented and experienced by their visitors. For people living and working in the principal tourist zones, encounters with tourists became a regular feature of their lives and even those who did not tourists on a daily basis or engage with tourism themselves were increasingly aware of tourism as a feature of the modern world.

2013

This book opens up a new field of discussion at the crossroads between contemporary art and critical tourism. As common ground for theoretical inquiry and artistic research, the notion of critical tourism asks us to question again our understanding of authenticity, the tourist gaze, the museification of landscape, the visual construction of place, post-romanticism, contemporary exoticism, site-specificity and global connectedness. The book specifically explores the role of the artist, and of the art institution, in the age of destination culture. How are individual and institutional practices changing in an era of hosting, hospitality, displacing and cultural nomadism? Based on the comparison between two very different but nonetheless similar landscapes—the Swiss Alps and the Baltic Dunes and Beaches—art historians, environmental historians, geographers, explorers, curators and artists address the relatively new field of critical tourism in a transdisciplinary context. Together they con sider how to critically approach and understand seductive and remote landscapes, against the backdrop of global cultural tourism. The book is not only a critical account of discussions around the topics but it is also rich in visual materials, documents and descriptions of artistic interventions in these two touristic settings. This publication is the result of over a year of exchanges between ECAV—Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais in Sierre (Switzerland) and Nida Art Colony (NAC), which belongs to the Vilnius Academy of Arts (Lithuania).The book reviews the concepts, residencies, exhibitions, workshops and the symposium that formed this exchange between 2012 to 2013, in the context of the research and residency programme “On Hosting and Displacing: Artistic Residencies and Cultural Production in Remote Contexts”.

1993

Annals of Tourism Research, 2014

This guidebook is the result off a titanic effort to compile almost 50 chapters into an allencompassing model to understand cultural tourism. One of the characteristics of cultural tourism is a particular way of engaging with the past. Encouraged by the construction of national identity, heritage and culture play a vital role by nourishing a positive view of modernity. The psychological experience given by the past not only is often not only absent from the present time, but is also needed to commoditize history.

Annals of Tourism Research, 2014

This is a paper I wrote for a course work and hence it is not very elaborate but I have tried for arguing and developing an insight on a post-modernist phenomenon called "Tourism". Though I develop a critique of the touristic experience but my aim is to locate culturally a common individual in the neo-liberal society. The conclusion of this paper is short due to limitations but there is a lot that could be said once the crux of the arguments is understood. I leave it to the readers to understand where they belong in this discourse.