Everyday Aesthetics, radicalizing Dewey’s notion of the continuity between art and experience, aims to find aesthetic qualities in ordinary experience. The problem is that it reduces the aesthetic significance that Dewey attributed to artistic production. Analyzing Dewey’s work and its interpreters, I will demonstrate that the continuity of ordinary experience and art is what lends art its vital and distinctive character. The work of art contributes to developing other ways of seeing and acting in the world, reinforcing life in common, (...) the basis of democracy. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the notion of experience, whose conceptual analysis seems to be often neglected or at least not sufficiently made explicit in the current discourse on Everyday Aesthetics. In our investigation this notion will be tackled, in particular, through the lens of such concepts as Erlebnis, Erfahrung, and Lebenswel t, which are drawn from the continental philosophical tradition. Purpose of the paper is to present a provisional framework aimed at clarifying that a more accurate conceptualization of experience allows (...) for a better contemporary reflection on the aesthetics of everyday life. (shrink)

How does Richard Shusterman’s Thinking Through the Body apply to the issues of everyday aesthetics? As it turns out, many chapters contribute significantly to everyday aesthetics, in particular the work on architecture, self-styling, the body as background, lovemaking, and the process of making a photographic portrait. Shusterman’s concentration on the art of living has special importance to everyday aesthetics. Current debates within the field of everyday aesthetics also raise problems for somaesthetics. I also question the limits of somaesthetics and Shusterman’s (...) rejection of defamiliarization in making the ordinary extraordinary. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the recognition of Jane Addams' aesthetic reflections. Her reflections extended pragmatism by anticipating some themes of Dewey’s aesthetics and some of its current aesthetic derivations. Addams broke down the barriers that separated art and life with the practices at Hull House in which immigrants of different ethnicities and women had an active and leading part. She thus expanded the social meaning of some of the avant-garde art movements that influenced her, such as the Art (...) and Crafts Movement, by trying to make aesthetic sensibility a part of the everyday life of Hull House’s neighbors. In this way, she anticipated current everyday aesthetics, but without diluting the artistic specificity. Art transfigures events through poetics, allowing us to transform our lives through the values that are the common heritage of humanity. In Addams, we find a social aesthetic that sheds light on some of the problems of contemporary theories, expands the considerations of the artistic movements of her time, and contributes to reflections on the vital importance of aesthetics. (shrink)

Title of the paper is the allusion to an article by Richard Shusterman. In the text, I trying to explore in the similar strategy the current state of aesthetic experience. Starting from The End of Aesthetic Experience I follow the notion of aesthetic experience which "will be strengthened and preserved the more it is experienced; it will be more experienced the more we are directed to such experience; and one good way of directing us to such experience is fuller recognition (...) of its importance and richness through greater attention to the concept of aesthetic experience". Is the somaesthetics became the answer to the loss of interest in aesthetic experience? The answer lies partly in examining the relationship between aesthetic experience and aesthetics of environment and everyday aesthetics, which further analysis of the notion pointed Shusterman himself. Result of research leads us to renewed role of aesthetic experience in contemporary aesthetics beyond the aesthetics of art. (shrink)