Comparative Everyday Aesthetics: An Introduction

Summary

1 The Everyday in Philosophical Aesthetics

In 2003, Crispin Sartwell's introduction to the aesthetics of the everyday noted “everyday aesthetics” as twofold in character: a philosophical interest in the “aesthetic experience of non-art objects and events”; and a corresponding “movement” in philosophical aesthetics concerned with distinctions between “fine and popular art” and “art and craft”. Also, Sartwell suggested both concerns began with one book, John Dewey's 1934 Art as Experience.

But the history of everyday aesthetics, while immediately and intellectually indebted to Dewey, precedes him. Indeed, there's a strong case that it has always been and will remain a fundamental concern, a philosophical inquiry into how we should live, with related moral, political, and ecological connotations. So, Sartwell's double characterization needs rethinking and amending. Moreover, we contend that a comparative approach is necessary as part of that project if it is not to be restricted to western experiences and notions of living aesthetically. Only then can it be truly said to be an everyday aesthetics about everyone too. Other perspectives from outside western everyday aesthetics include, for example, Daoist ideas on the nature of aesthetic experience. Its notions of the possibilities for total experiential engagement with our everyday environment have affinities with Deweyan ideas about heightened, valuable and adaptive aesthetic experience. Where and how these everyday aesthetic experiences occur – our encounters with quotidian things, occasions, and activities – anticipates discussions that comprise the book. It consists of cultural perspectives from British, American, Chinese, and Japanese authors, who remind us of and examine, the pleasures and meanings found in everyday aesthetic lives.

But, before summarizing those contributions, it is useful to further introduce the landscape of everyday aesthetics in terms of its scope and aims as a movement; and to note the philosophical problems they have engendered.

1.1 Everyday Aesthetics’ Scope: Beyond Fine Art

Sartwell states that “the realm of the aesthetic” is established by acknowledging that “there is an aesthetic dimension to a variety of experiences that are common to nearly all people but would not normally be seen as experiences of fine art”. He gives the supposed cross-cultural examples of “body adornment” and the “arrangement and ornamentation of [our] immediate environment to create a pleasing effect.”