Aesthetics

I really found Mark Fisher's ideas about how historical artifacts and idols (anything that served a purpose in previous societies) are turned into aesthetic objects under neoliberal capitalism in the first chapter of his book Capitalist Realism to be very interesting. I am also interested in the fact that more and more young people are now interested in aesthetics (although this may be different from what is traditionally termed as "aesthetics" in philosophy).

Can you recommend something for a deeper dive in this topic?

Hello all,

I have noticed that there is a link between a love of an idealised kind of nature and fascist aesthetics. I'm thinking about the sort of paintings the Nazis like with their depictions of German landscapes (for example Water-lillies by Dettmann). There are also lots of modern "cottage-core" style movements with very traditional, rural aesthetics that have fascist under/overtones.

Of course, I'm not the first to notice the link between the twee countryside and Fascism but I'm struggling to find resources on it. Are there any classic books/articles about the relationship between fascist and presentation of nature/the countryside/the twee in fascist aesthetics?

Any help much appreciated.

I recently wondered what makes masses of people in uniforms and flags that march in unison so appealing to many people. Maybe you know those tiktok edits of warhammer 40k/wolfenstein soldiers over some synth beat that get huge amount of views. I also noticed for myself that the "tankie"-aesthetics is kind of appealing for me and this is kinda scary.

So what is this that makes it appealing? Is it the image of order and masculinity? Would love to hear your thoughts on this :)

Edit: Thanks for all the interesting input!

Hi everybody,

I recently read Timothy Aubry's , and though I am far from agreeing with the author, the text was intellectually stimulating because it forced me to think through the "point" of a literary critic.

I suggest checking it out, but let me provide a brief summary of its main claims here. Aubry says that aesthetic judgments never left academic literary criticism, they only switched orientation; whereas New Criticism valued 'beauty,' deconstruction valued the 'sublime.' However, literary critics were reluctant to argue that they kept doing aesthetic judgments because aesthetic judgments were coded as enforcing problematic hegemonies and masking themselves as non-political. Aubry argues that they can and have been those things, but they need not be them now that we are conscious of it. Arguing that they are just that reduces literature by minorities to mere political pamphlets rather than works of art, and they deserve to be seen as works of art. Aubry argues for pluralistic criticism that distinguishes between but does not advocate for either aesthetic or political criticism, instead keeps both in mind.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay wrote a great but somewhat scathing of Aubry's book, which faults Aubry for conflating aesthetic experience with pleasure and for conceiving the 'political' too reductively. Aubry wrote a response that conceded to some of Tremblay's criticisms.

I am trying to form an opinion of my own, but I would love to hear anybody else's thoughts. I agree that aesthetic judgments--as a concept--could somehow not be inherently oppressive, but it is hard to undermine how much they once were and continue to be. These judgments were made with criteria that deconstruction helped expose, thus now we have "better" criteria. It is also true that when we read Kafka or Morrison we should not read them as only existing to advocate for one political platform. And yet, remembering Deleuze and Guattari's observations on minor literatures, I think it is simply impossible to make any aspect of their work (or anybody's work) apolitical. You can point out their prose is beautiful--I do not see how doing so amounts to undermine their political load.

Interestingly, Aubry commends Lee Edelman's work on No Future as an example of a radical non-liberal thinker opting out of the system instead of rehabilitating it by embracing queer outsider-ness rather than show how palatable queerness is/can be. (Among contemporary queer scholars, however, Edelman embodies a more 'conservative' or orthodox queer theory that downplays racial difference). To make things more confusing for myself, I think Aubry is praising Edelman for something he is not doing himself...he is trying to rehabilitate aesthetic judgments in/for academia, arguing that their modification can lead to a more equitable canon, a democratization of good taste...but is not their embrace by academia what neutralizes them/forces them on others? This is where I hit a block, I think. Hierarchization is at the root of the problem, so the critic "undoes" it, but in doing so they unwillingly make another hierarchy.

And yet, if the critic's task is expressing judgments but the notion of judgment itself is murky, then what is the critic needed for? It seems to me some sort of (inverted?) paradox of tolerance or some version of dialectics...we must not uphold judgments unless they are undoing other (noxious) judgments.

I have been thinking about this because I was told that as a literary critic myself I interpret texts in an anti-aesthetic way, focusing on content to the detriment of form and style, which is the core of literary studies after all. My issue with this comment, though, is that as concepts art and 'aesthetics' (and the privileging of them) are embedded in power/ideology, and I think my way of reading resists enforcing certain versions of those. I am not interested in showing how the texts I study are 'beautiful' or 'good' and I do not think focusing on content is insulting to the text as art because, well, Duchamp has forever made me wary of 'art.' I do not think this position is against pleasure or imagination, but I see why somebody would feel that way if I write mostly about the problems raised by a text rather than its merits...

If anybody has any reading recs (asides from Sianne Ngai, whose brilliant work I know quite well already) I would also appreciate it.

I'm looking for books on aesthetics and theories of contemporary art. can you help me? Even fundamental books (not necessarily recently released) Thank you! <3

Please recommend me some books to introduce myself in this area of thinking.

Studied Philosophy at university level but at the time, I completely skipped over the aesthetics/art sections and I've recently gotten invested in learning more about it now... does anybody have any good book or textbook recommendations that break down beginner aesthetics / art philosophy without being written for beginners in philosophy?

There's a hundred different books naturally when you search online, so I wanted to know if anyone had any good experiences with a specific one before I fork out £40 to be disappointed :D

Currently looking at:

• Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: 5 (Contemporary Debates in Philosophy) - Matthew Kieran

• Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art - Darren Hudson Hick

So if anyone has read either of them I would especially love to hear from you, thanks!!

If somebody asserts the Earth is flat or that 2+2=5, we can establish that they are incorrect. There are objective evidence and proof that show they are wrong.
If two people have a disagreement on morals or aesthetics, how can it be established who is right and who is wrong? If I claim that a given action is wrong and somebody disagrees, it is likely they would disagree with my moral reasoning and first principles as well. Ditto for beauty. If we cannot establish who is correct, how can it be objective?

What are some good introductory textbooks on aesthetics?

Hello! I hope everyone is doing well. I was speaking about philosophy with a friend when they made this claim that aesthetics precede ethics and I wanted more context on it and perhaps to read some arguments against and in favor of the statement.

So I’ve always intuitively held that there isn’t an objective way to say if this movie, painting, song, video game etc is objectively good or bad, but I’ve also checked out the questions in the PhilPapers survey and one question was “art: subjective or objective”. What are some arguments to support aesthetic objectivity? If I happen to enjoy an objectively bad piece of media, would I be mistaken the same way someone insists 2+2=5?

Hi, im a student of philosophy, 4th year. I've had aesthetics as a subject. My prof was an old lady that didnt teach us anything. My oral exam consisted of questions such as "hi, how are you? What do you study? What do you like about philosophy?" You can probably tell i passed with with the best grade. Naturally, now i dont know anything about aesthetics. I've read Heidegger and thats pretty much it i think.

Any literature recommendations? Im okay with advanced stuff,but id prefere the basics first. Thanks.

I had a thought recently while at a particularly intense show about how social conventions transform or even disappear in the concert location. Normally, touching strangers is considered fairly taboo - acceptable in certain situations but extremely rarely expected or normalized. But at a concert, nobody expects to avoid contact with a stranger.

Dancing becomes something entirely personal yet totally public - people who might normally say they "don't dance" be it out of general embarrassment or feeling like they don't dance well often find themselves totally comfortable dancing without any concern for their skill or anything like that.

If I was to try and make an argument about what causes such a breakdown of social norms, I'm tempted to say that the barriers of individualism break down. The Other ceases to threaten our reality, so contact is less jarring, and we don't see them as a force of judgement in the same way. It seems to me that in the throes of a concert - especially if it's a fairly intense one - the way I think of the strangers around me changes.

Why, though, is the real question. Sartre argues that the Other is a threat to us because their experience of reality is clearly independent of our own, and so proves our experience to be subjective and vulnerable. We lose control over reality, because it's not just our reality anymore - we have to compromise with others.

But art is unique. I'm going to paraphrase my understanding of Kant's aesthetics - an understanding which may be somewhat un-orthodox - but I'm unfortunately away from most of my texts so I can't provide quotes or things like that. I did an independent study on aesthetics in undergrad, and my professor and I came to a reading of Kant that I think fits well here. But I'm happy to be corrected if I misunderstand something.

Essentially, the way we saw it was that Aesthetics are a disruption to the binary of objective and subjective. Aesthetic experience is simultaneously objective and subjective. It is a truly subjective experience, in that the experience of the aesthetic is about how the subject receives the sensory experience of the object. But, at the same time, we acknowledge an objective experience within art. We fail to articulate it often, but the existence of art museums, of art critics, etc, to me proves that we accept that one individuals experience of art will correspond to other people's experiences of art.

To put it another way, our thought was that Kant's concept of the aesthetic was "the subjective objective", an experience which exists both subjectively and objectively - simultaneously. It's subjective significance is contingent on the fact that it accesses something universal that we share.

SO, to bring this back to the subject of concerts, I wonder if that is the mechanism at play. At a concert, the Other stops appearing as a threat to us at the point where we are so consumed by the Aesthetic experience that our subjectivity no longer seems separate from the subjectivities that surround us.

If you've ever heard a song and felt it's meaning, I think what I'm saying will make sense. When you just know what the artist is saying, without concerning yourself with questions like "well, is this actually what they mean...", Where you're so confident in your understanding that it transcends interpretation, that to me exemplifies this. It's not that you can put it into words, you usually can't, but the feeling itself is tangible.

Anyway, this is all a bit stream of consciousness, and I want to hear from people if my interpretations of various authors have flaws, but I think there's something worth considering in the experience of a concert.

And if you've read or seen any works that discuss concerts in any capacity, please let me know. I'm extremely curious.

Intuitively, I want to say that "bad taste" is:

Liking or approving of something, perceiving it as desirable, of high quality, respectable, beautiful, attractive, well-crafted, genius, etc. when "in fact" that thing is not, or that thing is not "deserving" of such praise despite one's beliefs that it does. If one experiences beauty from "bad art" or genuinely enjoys a "bad game", and they praise it for being good, they're in fact wrong.

Basically, I have bad taste if I like a piece of art/music/game etc. and/or endorse the high quality of that piece of art, when in fact that art is not of high quality as I genuinely believe it to be. If this is true of me, then I have bad taste.

But that's a very naïve view that I am certainly not committed to.

Is there more robust discussion of the nature of bad taste and its existence?

TLDR, What's going on if I like something that sucks but I think it's good?

[EDIT] Just to clarify, my impromptu definition above does indeed imply action: If I'm wrong about the quality of a piece of art, that implies that me liking it ought to be discouraged, I should be educated or informed so that I like it less and that I like only good things, etc.

After all, if it's completely permissible for me to like it, then in what sense could bad taste exist? If bad taste exists, that seems to imply that I ought to engage in it less - that we should be educating and encouraging people to have less bad taste.

To me this is the particularly interesting part.

I’m a writer and a filmmaker - an artist, I guess you could say, though I’m personally averse to the word. As such, I feel like aesthetics is not only relevant but crucially important to my work. Where can I begin learning more about it? Videos would be preferred but obviously nothing tops a well rounded book on the subject.

Has there been any work on Pierce's aesthetics since he died? And are there any good answers to what he meant by concrete reasonableness?