To live an aesthetic life is to live a life that often focuses on beauty. It's creating it in our environment and noticing it in our daily lives. It's being aware of it and truly appreciating and celebrating it. We can begin to understand why aesthetic life is important by imagining life without aesthetic value.
What would we miss? A lot of pleasure and excitement, no doubt, but that's not nearly all. A life without aesthetic value would be a life without an important part of ourselves and without a unique and profound source of community. Aesthetic life is important because it allows us to freely explore and cultivate our individuality so that special forms of community are created and maintained. This chapter makes this point through a detailed analogy with food.
Food is what's worth eating, where eating is a complex social practice that underpins health, creativity and social life. In the same way, aesthetic value is what deserves an aesthetic assessment, when the practice of aesthetic valuation is oriented around the goods of freedom, individuality and community. Aesthetics, the philosophical study of beauty and taste. It is closely related to the philosophy of art, which deals with the nature of art and with the concepts on the basis of which individual works of art are interpreted and evaluated. Our daily routines (cleaning, living, socializing, going to work, running errands, or just sitting quietly) are usually not appreciated, because they lack the element of surprise or novelty of special events.
However, they are immensely important to our happiness. Below are several strategies to enrich our aesthetic experience when faced with everyday routines (Yuriko, 201). Through repeated practice, we can cultivate an aesthetic sensitivity to everyday objects and activities). In short, everyday aesthetics means appreciating the mundane activities of our daily lives, considering them extraordinary (Leddy, 201).
Living with art means being genuinely interested in all the details of life daily). From this perspective, an interesting or happy life could also be considered a creative work of art. Therefore, aesthetics must have a wider scope than the study of beauty or other aesthetic concepts if we want to discover the principles by which it must be defined. Much of recent aesthetics has similarly focused on artistic problems, and it's arguably now orthodox to consider aesthetics exclusively through the study of art.
However, the challenge, in addition to the opportunity, posed by these heterogeneous and specific practices of each discipline is to investigate whether there is a general unifying notion of aesthetic experience and aesthetic practice. All these works together have given rise to an increasingly lively debate on the subject in journals such as Aisthesis, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Contemporary Aesthetics, Espes, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics and Studi di Estetica (Italian Journal of Aesthetics), to name but a few that present or include articles in English. This view can be interpreted as a faithful application of the statement made by the theory of aesthetic attitude that, in theory, anything can be an object of aesthetic experience. The focus on negative aesthetics is particularly important in everyday aesthetic discourse because it leads to what could be considered its activist dimension.
While everyday aesthetics has matured significantly since its relatively recent appearance in Western aesthetic discourse, there are still many tasks to be tackled. If everyday aesthetics has focused on what has been characterized as a relatively stable environment made up of familiar environments and material objects, the challenge is to explore whether and in what way rapid changes in the familiar everyday affect the nature of everyday aesthetics as discourse. In posing these questions, everyday aesthetics challenges assumptions rooted in aesthetic discourse centered on art. At the beginning of this post, it was explained that the emergence of everyday aesthetics was historically and culturally situated to challenge what was considered an art-centered aesthetic that dominated the Western aesthetic of the last century.
Therefore, the model of aesthetic discourse is that of a spectator who obtains an aesthetic experience from an object that is relatively isolated from the rest of life. Much of the conventional aesthetic debate revolves around the objectivity and justifiability of aesthetic judgment. In addition, more anthologies on everyday aesthetics have recently been published, such as the volume Aisthesis, dedicated to the topic of everyday objects (201), Experiencing the Everyday (Friberg and Vasquez, 201), and Paths from the Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics (Kuisma, et al. In fact, his later works on environmental aesthetics, both natural and constructed, and more recently on social aesthetics and negative aesthetics, have constantly opened up the field of aesthetic research.
By placing “the aesthetic” in the character of an experience and not in a specific type of object or situation, Dewey paves the way for advocates of everyday aesthetics to explore various aspects of the aesthetic life of people without set pre-set limits. The use of aesthetics as a strategy for consumerism and the political agenda has, therefore, been a concern for everyday aesthetics.
