The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

Introduction

Jonathan M. Smith

OUR SUBJECT MATTER is everyday aesthetics, both as an extension beyond the traditional domain of the philosophical study of aesthetics, usually confined to more conventionally understood works of art, and as a step into a new arena of aesthetic inquiry—the broader world itself. This introduction summarizes the contents of the papers that follow, aiming to guide the reader on the common themes arising in the chapters and explaining the reasoning behind the organization of the volume.

The chapters in the first section of this book make general arguments for application of aesthetic criticism to objects and events that have been, until recently, exempt from this sort of scrutiny. In chapter one Tom Leddy offers an outline of the field of everyday aesthetics. This chapter admirably provides an overview of this topic in relation to traditional work in aesthetic theory and thus stands in for such a discussion that could have been provided in this introduction. Looking at colloquial usage of aesthetic terms, Leddy proposes that everyday aesthetics be taken to include inquiries into all aesthetic experiences that fall outside of existing domains of aesthetic theory, such as aesthetics of art, aesthetics of nature, and aesthetics of mathematics. Everyday aesthetics is not, in other words, limited to study of the aesthetic experience of humble objects and quotidian acts, although such are often of interest to everyday aesthetics. It is concerned with all of the undeniably aesthetic experiences that do arise when one contemplates objects or performs acts that are not traditionally categorized as aesthetic objects or acts, be they rare or frequent, fugitive or profound. What sets the everyday aesthetic experience apart is the fact that it seems to be prompted by something that should not be able to cause such an experience, at least according to conventional aesthetic theory. Leddy maintains that this is because the aesthetic properties of everyday aesthetic experience inhere in the fusion of sense and imagination that is the experience itself, and not in the object of the aesthetic experience. The question for everyday aesthetics therefore becomes not what are the formal properties of this object that make it beautiful, but rather what is the relation between subject and object that makes this particular experience of that object beautiful. There are, Leddy concedes, difficulties with this approach. Many subjects do, after all, find beauty in maudlin kitsch, and it is not entirely clear how, say, Hummel figurines should be treated in Leddy’s everyday aesthetics. There is also a danger that this theory of the aesthetics of everyday life might seem to lend intellectual support to the commercial aestheticization of everyday life that one finds in advertisements. Finally, it is unclear what should be done with the promiscuous aesthetic experiences of individuals who, due to a temporarily or permanently ecstatic state of mind, find beauty everywhere.

Like Leddy, Arnold Berleant believes that aesthetic properties are present in places other than those covered by traditional aesthetic theory. In chapter two he argues that aesthetic properties can be discerned in human relations when these are ethical and just. Berleant grounds his argument in a model of the aesthetic situation that details the many conditions that must be met for an aesthetic experience to occur. These include: the belief that aesthetic experience is possible in any particular situation, a lively sensory awareness (with all of the senses) of all that is present in that situation, the discipline to keep this sensory awareness from fading into a stereotype of that situation, and the ability to enter into unreserved communion with that situation. Berleant insists that traditional art objects cannot be aesthetically appreciated if these conditions are not met; he then postulates that things other than traditional art objects can be aesthetically appreciated when these conditions are met. Indeed it appears that we are prepared to recognize and appreciate beauty in social forms and relationships, as is evident in theater, film, television, etiquette, and ritual. When we speak of a beautiful marriage, or family, or friendship, we are not, of course, praising the pulchritude of the parties involved in these unions, but rather some quality in the union itself. This quality, Berleant suggests, is love, and he goes on to detail the many parallels between love and beauty. Expanding this notion of the beauty of loving relations to the scale of the political unit, he describes an aesthetic community that is anarchistic, socialistic, and in some ways reminiscent of nineteenth-century utopian movements.

Berleant’s everyday aesthetics requires one to preserve one’s sense of wonder, to look upon a familiar thing with the same wide eyes one had when one looked upon that thing for the first time. In chapter three Arto Haapala pursues an existentialist argument to the opposite conclusion. He insists that the preoccupation of aesthetic theory with aesthetics of art, and more particularly modern art, has led to a widespread but erroneous assumption that the experience of art, especially modern art, is the only form of aesthetic experience. Thus strangeness, surprise, shock, and wonder, which are integral to the experience of modern art, are supposed by many to be indispensable ingredients in all aesthetic experiences. Haapala does not deprecate this aesthetics of strangeness, but argues that it is limited. Most individuals live most of their lives surrounded by familiar things, persons, and activities, whose beauty is to be found not by treating them as if they were endlessly novel, but by delighting in their easy familiarity. Like Heidegger’s hammer, everyday things have a beauty that is present only when the things themselves are little noticed. The hammer is a simple tool adapted to a simple task; places, according to Haapala, are complex tools adapted to the complex task of living an individual life. The carpenter delights in his hammer because it allows him to be a carpenter; he scrutinizes the object only when it fails, and thereby interrupts his being. Likewise, one delights in the places that allow one to be one’s self, to act out one’s existential structure; one is surprised by, and grows sensible of, these places only when they fail and thereby disrupt one’s way of being-in-the world.

Each of the preceding essays in some way challenges the notion that artworks properly inhabit a world apart from everyday things, and more particularly everyday and useful things. Michael Principe approaches this problem squarely in chapter four. Drawing from published works by the critic Arthur Danto and the painter Gianfranco Baruchello, he discusses the state of affairs when artwork is very much part of the everyday world (performance art) and the everyday world is very much part of artwork (ready-mades). Unlike Danto, who sees this promiscuous mingling of art and the everyday as the end of art history and the beginning of aimless pluralism, Principe sees in it an opportunity for art, its independent history having ended, to find direction and purpose in the concerns of political struggles and history. Inspired by Baruchello’s claim that his farm is art because it is a stimulating and nurturing context for creativity, Principe suggests that serving as the occasion for further aesthetic statements is itself an aesthetic quality. Aimless pluralism may ensue when we lift the barrier that has for centuries separated artworks from everyday things, but this can be averted if we at the same time lift the barrier that has for centuries separated artworks from the world of everyday struggles and projects.

The second section of this book contains essays on the aesthetics of everyday environments. These environments are shaped by the intentions of designers and the actions of builders, but as Pauline von Bonsdorff argues in chapter five, their beauty often depends on shaping forces that designers and builders do not, by choice or necessity, control. Juxtapositions with adjacent buildings, the nature of the site, marks of wear and weathering, all play a part in lending character to a building, and it is the grace with which a building accepts these mundane exactions on its individual being that in large part determines its aesthetic value. A building cannot do other than actively shape an environment, but a good building also abides that environment; a good builder regards nature as not simply a plastic medium for the expression of his artistic intentions, but also as a creative agent in its own right. Because a good building does not appear to repudiate its surroundings or controvert time (made evident in wear and weathering), it conveys to those who know it a tacit knowledge that abiding and active shaping can be reconciled into a highly satisfactory way of being in the world. What we experience as the beauty of everyday environments is, in fact, according to Bonsdorff, tacit knowledge of this reciprocal way of being in the world.

In chapter six Allen Carlson argues that aesthetic appreciation of landscape requires much more than tacit knowledge, and in fact depends on articulate knowledge drawn from a range of academic and cultural discourses. The forms of landscape on which all aesthetic enjoyment depends are selected and made clearly visible by the viewer’s understanding of the meaning, significance, or content of the scene. Much of this content is furnished by the common knowledge of objects that one learns with language, so that one sees as significant forms those things that one has nouns to name. This content is enriched by scientific knowledge that categorizes these forms and explains the creative processes by which they have been shaped, so that knowledge of convection, say, enhances the beauty of a cumulus cloud, just as knowledge of the Renaissance enhances the beauty of a painting by Giotto. Because a landscape, unlike a painting, is always a work in progress, appreciation of its formal characteristics is also enhanced by knowledge of past and present human land use. Thus articulate knowledge of the history that produced a landscape is, for Carlson, necessary to appreciation of that landscape, just as articulate knowledge of the history that produced a work of art is necessary to appreciation of that work of art. This articulate knowledge of the processes that have produced a landscape is properly augmented by articulate knowledge of the accretions of cultural meaning that incorrigibly color any given viewer’s reception of that landscape. Thus appreciation of landscape is enriched by knowledge of myths and legends, the use of landscapes as symbols that connote ideas, and of the consequent representation of these landscapes in art, because this grants the viewer a degree of self consciousness of the ways in which he himself, as a member of a particular culture, shapes the scene before his eyes.

Many of the authors collected here explain everyday aesthetics as an experience of pleasure and meaning that results when a special relationship exists, or is established, between a subject and an object, or between several subjects brought together and coordinated by an object. This theme is made explicit in chapter seven, in which Andrew Light attempts to reconcile elements from the competing philosophies of technology of Andrew Feenberg and Albert Borgmann through a close reading of Wim Wenders’s film, Alice in the Cities (1973). Light poses two central questions. How can one account for the fact that one experiences some spaces as satisfying and thick, and others as alienating and thin? Are thin spaces necessarily alienating, or can they be, so to speak, thickened by regarding them in a new light? He draws on Borgmann to answer the first question. Thick spaces, like Borgmann’s focal things, cause those who inhabit them to assume roles, enter into relationships, and cultivate relevant skills, demands that serve to give these inhabitants a sense of meaning and identity. Thin spaces, like Borgmann’s devices, demand little from their inhabitants (except, often enough, cash payment), and consequently lend no significant shape to their lives. The second question, prompted by Feenburg, is whether this spectral and amorphous existence is an inescapable consequence of thin spaces or can be subverted. Light answers this question with a close reading of Wenders’s film that shows how apparently thin spaces aesthetically thicken once they become a setting for roles, relationships, and meaningful projects.

The third section of this book contains essays that describe and interpret particular everyday events, experiences, and objects that have aesthetic qualities. In chapter eight Wolfgang Welsch questions why sport, with its generally acknowledged grace and beauty, is not considered an art and subjected to aesthetic criticism. He argues that the prejudice is based on outdated definitions of art and understandings of sport. As other authors in this volume have argued, the concept of aesthetic quality can be abstracted from artworks, and that something very similar can be found to subsist, if perhaps less potently, in objects that are not conventional works of art. Artists themselves have in many cases taken the lead in questioning art as a valid category of reality, and have busied themselves blurring boundaries between high art and popular art, between the various high arts, and between art and life. Given these relaxed criteria, there is, Welsch contends, no reason not to consider the possibility that sport is art. Indeed the athlete is increasingly understood in terms appropriate to an artist: he does not, as was formerly thought, discipline his body so much as allow it to express the perfection of its own nature. Having stated why we may wish to view sport as art, Welsch works to eliminate the more obvious objections to such a view. Although sport, unlike art, contains an explicit purpose of winning, it is also driven, as art is driven, by a desire to be a perfect instance of the type of performance that it is. Although sport, unlike (modern) art, does not strive to break the rules, it does strive, as (traditional) art strove, to realize new possibilities within rules. Although sport does not have clear meaning, in the sense of referents outside the sport event itself, it nevertheless expresses in highly stylized ways basic human traits such as pluck, desire, exaltation, or loss of nerve. Sport is, therefore, but one of the many forms of demotic entertainment that satisfy the aesthetic needs of ordinary people; it cannot replace difficult art, but neither should we allow it (or its counterparts) to be entirely overshadowed by difficult art when we set to describing the aesthetics of today’s world.

In chapter nine Yuriko Saito makes a similar argument for aesthetic appreciation of weather. Like Welsch, she does this with a series of responses to possible objections against consideration of weather as an aesthetic object. One cannot, for instance, separate weather from the context of nature in general in the same way that Western culture has, traditionally, separated aesthetic objects from the context of objects in general. Nor can one discipline the manner in which people view weather in the same way that Western culture has, traditionally, disciplined the manner in which people view art. Saito counters such objections by noting that, in the West, the work of art was separated from ordinary objects (in museums, for instance), and viewed according to definite conventions, largely to protect its meaning from distortion by extraneous associations and ignorant interpretations. Since weather, viewed aesthetically, has no such purport, such precautions are unnecessary. A second objection to weather as an aesthetic object is that it has practical consequences, and cannot therefore be viewed with the impersonal disinterestedness that many aestheticians believe is necessary to appreciate the sensuous surface of an aesthetic object. Against this Saito contends that feelings aroused by weather become part of the experienced aesthetic object, and therefore may, when sufficiently mild, be viewed with disinterest even by the person feeling them. Illustrating her point with Japanese poetry, Saito notes that aesthetically satisfying weather is often sufficiently inconvenient to arouse feelings, but seldom so threatening as to prohibit disinterested enjoyment. The last objection to weather as an aesthetic object is that it is evanescent, unlike great art, which is thought to endure. Yet most will agree that many of the keenest beauties of weather are fleeting, as in the moment when rain gives way to sunshine or the cold shadow of an ominous thunderhead creeps across the land. Such beauties of weather are, in fact, strangely absent from those monotonous spans of stable temperatures and sunshine that we call, by convention, beautiful weather. Drawing again from Japanese poetry, Saito suggests that this may be because transient beauty reconciles us, in some degree, to our own mortal transience, while unpredicted beauty assures us that goodness can at least sometimes spring from natural processes that are wild and beyond human control.

Emily Brady argues for formal aesthetic appreciation of tastes and smells in chapter ten, and, as in the two previous chapters, does so by answering objections that might be raised against attempts at such appreciation. Traditional Western aesthetics, has, for instance, deprecated smelling and tasting as low pleasures of the body, animal pleasures without appeal for the incorporeal mind. Brady deflects this objection with an appeal to materialist philosophies of mind, which deny that there is a difference between mind and brain and thereby demote the mind and its allegedly lofty pleasures to the same level as the body and its enjoyments. In addition to their stigmatization as low pleasures, smell and taste are deemed by many unsuited to aesthetic appreciation because their close connection to appetites makes them impossible to appreciate in a disinterested manner. And even if it is allowed that some tastes and smells are savored simply for the pleasure they afford, it may be objected that they lack the complex structure necessary for a sensation to be more than what Kant described as agreeable. Against these objections Brady raises the examples of connoisseurship in costly drink, cigars, and perfume, a well-developed form of aesthetic appreciation that also disproves the allegation that tastes and smells are not susceptible to critical standards or terminology. These commodified tastes do not exhaust the range of tastes and fragrances that can be subjected to aesthetic criticism and analysis; they do make it clear that such analysis and criticism is possible. Indeed Brady encourages us to develop this sort of gustatory, and more especially this sort of olfactory, discrimination in our dealings with the tastes and smells of the everyday world.

In chapter eleven Glen Kuehn enlarges on Elizabeth Telfer’s 1996 argument that food is a minor art, making more robust claims on the strength of ideas drawn from John Dewey. Dewey famously argued that because art is a distillation of experience it must, like experience, transform its subject in such a way that he or she grows capable of additional, more fully integrated experience. With this description of the aesthetic experience in hand, Kuehn is able to dismiss the scruples that prevented Telfer from affirming that some food might, in certain circumstances, be considered the equal of any of the arts. He insists that certain experiences of eating do transform the eater’s understanding, not only of the possibilities inherent in that particular food, or of food and eating in general, but also of the possibilities inherent in life itself. Kuehn concludes that the best argument against consideration of food as high art is that food has not traditionally been considered as high art, but that this reliance on tradition is incongruent with the prevailing belief that all such categories are fluid social constructions.

Kuehn’s analysis of food brings the collection full circle to the theme of experience first raised by Leddy in chapter one. Indeed, viewed as a set, these chapters disclose a degree of unanimity remarkable for a field as young and undeveloped as everyday aesthetics. Perhaps the clearest and most consistent of these is that the everyday aesthetic experience arises when a certain, often evanescent, relationship exists, either between a subject and an everyday object, or between subjects brought into a happy configuration by their mutual relation to an object. This should, of course, come as no surprise, since the relational basis of the everyday aesthetic experience would seem to account for the facts that nothing in the everyday world is invariably beautiful, even to those who wish that some things were, and that nothing in the everyday world (or at least very little) can be supposed devoid of the power to excite an aesthetic response in the proper circumstances. As if in some great dance, we move among the twirling things of the everyday world, enjoying but for a moment the beauty in their already half-averted faces.

PART I

Theorizing the Aesthetics

of the Everyday

CHAPTER 1

The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics

Tom Leddy

WHAT IS EVERYDAY AESTHETICS? It would be a mistake to take the term everyday too literally. A musician who practices and plays every day can justly say that her everyday aesthetic experience is mainly connected with music. A naturalist could similarly say that his everyday aesthetic experience is of nature. Yet when we talk about everyday aesthetic experience, we are thinking of aesthetic issues that are not connected closely with the fine arts or with the natural environment, or with other areas that form well-established aesthetic domains, for example, the aesthetics of mathematics, science, or religion. We are thinking instead of the home, the daily commute, the workplace, the shopping center, and places of amusement.

The issues that generally come up have to do with personal appearance, ordinary housing design, interior decoration, workplace aesthetics, sexual experience, appliance design, cooking, gardening, hobbies, play, appreciation of children’s art projects, and other similar matters.¹ Of course the boundaries are not clearly drawn. Everyday aesthetics is a loose category. For example, the aesthetics of weather seems to fall equally within everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of nature. Children’s art projects fall somewhere between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art. I hope to show in this chapter what the boundaries might be, and give some idea of the scope of inquiry.

Discussion of everyday aesthetics allows us to talk about things that do not generally come up in traditional aesthetics. It opens a whole new domain of inquiry. Yet, this domain is closely related to more traditional fields of aesthetics. For example, terms are often shared between it and the aesthetics of art. Also, much art is based on, or inspired by, everyday aesthetic experience. Vermeer, for example, draws our attention to the aesthetic pleasures of bourgeois Dutch house interiors. We see art, at least in part, in terms of everyday aesthetics, and we see everyday aesthetics, at least partially, in terms of art. Nor should we forget that we see both, at least in part, in terms of the aesthetics of nature.

Of special importance is the relationship between everyday aesthetics and environmental aesthetics. There is considerable overlap. Environmental aesthetics points the way to appreciation of everyday aesthetics by focusing on the entire lived experience, for example, of a walk in the woods. One could certainly approach everyday aesthetics in the holistic manner of environmental aesthetics. My own daily walk to work is an example of a fairly complex experiential whole that may be analyzed along the lines of environmental aesthetics. I may appreciate the nature of the day (sunny and fresh), the seasonal variations of the plant life (spring has arrived!), the flowery smells of plant-clippings (brought out by a recent rain), the cultural richness of our ethnically diverse community (notice that statue of the Virgin!), architectural niceties of ordinary buildings (the California bungalow that looks a bit like a Frank Lloyd Wright), the physical pleasure of my own bodily movement, the quick vision of a white crane in Coyote creek as I walk over the bridge (a fragment of nature appreciation), and the fashion statements of students as I enter the campus. All of the senses are involved.

But notice that the aesthetic delights of my walk may also be relatively isolated and less holistic. I am an amateur photographer, and I often look at scenes of everyday life as potential shots through an imagined frame. For this, and other reasons, I would not make everyday aesthetics just a branch of environmental aesthetics. It will be helpful to turn to a recent work in environmental aesthetics by Arnold Berleant to explore this point.² Berleant recognizes that environmental aesthetics was originally focused on the natural environment, but wishes to expand it to include the aesthetics of everyday life. Thus, he informs us that environmental aesthetics will deal with how we engage with the prosaic landscapes of home, work, local travel, and recreation (16). He notes that we engage the landscape aesthetically as we drive to work or school, go shopping, walk the dog, or picnic in a park (20). Although Berleant’s contribution is valuable, I believe that taking the aesthetics of the natural environment as paradigmatic places unnecessary limitations on everyday aesthetics. First, contemporary photography, assemblage, and 3D work have taught us to appreciate many landscapes that would be repulsive to most nature lovers (for example, German sculptor Olaf Metzel’s Outdoors, 1992, which creates a work of art out of camping tents and netting, and his 112–104, 1991, which uses debris from a destroyed basketball court; and Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s wonderful film, The Way Things Go, 1985–87, both featured in Art in America, June 1997). Some of my own strongest aesthetic experiences have come from viewing the display of junkyards and storage yards along the train route from San Jose to San Francisco. Berleant implies that such things as telephone poles, power lines, commercial strips, trailer parks, suburban malls, and parking lots necessarily embody negative aesthetic values (20). Yet, these are often the subjects of contemporary painting and photography, which provide mediation for our experiencing them in aesthetically positive terms.

Second, an exclusive focus on landscape would draw our attention away from appreciation of relatively isolated objects. Consider a key scene in the 2001 Academy-Award-nominated movie, American Beauty. The boy-next-door is a drug-pusher and a voyeur, and yet he shows his new girlfriend a video he made of a plastic bag shuffling back and forth against a building wall in a gentle swirl of local wind—an image of extraordinary beauty. From a traditional environmentalist perspective, this video simply records the existence of a plastic bag not properly recycled. From a landscape environment perspective, it shows lack of concern for the total environment: there is no landscape present, and only one of the senses is engaged. Yet, this video-within-a-movie makes us aware of possibilities of powerful aesthetic experience that are not particularly environmental or landscape-oriented.

Third, Berleant’s attack on traditional aesthetics goes too far when he says that the conscious body does not observe the world contemplatively but participates actively in the experiential process (12). Why should we accept this strict dichotomy? Why cannot we enjoy both? Berleant discourages the detached visual contemplation exemplified by the above-mentioned video, and would disallow my own contemplative appreciation of urban scenes from a train window. Although engagement of all of the senses can contribute to a powerful aesthetic experience, this should not preclude the possibility, and value, of aesthetic experience that focuses on one sense, and is relatively disengaged.

Allen Carlson, another major figure in environmental aesthetics, insists that experiencing nature as a static two-dimensional object unduly limits our appreciation of it, and that we must appreciate natural objects in terms of correct scientific knowledge. Carlson rejects appreciation of nature in pictorial terms, which he believes is to misunderstand it. Whether this is the right approach to appreciating nature I cannot say, but it would seem somewhat bizarre to approach the aesthetics of everyday life in terms of this primacy of scientific cognition, for example, the home in terms of the science of house management, or the aesthetics of sex in terms of sexology. Moreover, we do not need the cognitive approach to help us appreciate the scenically challenged (to borrow a term from Yuriko Saito) aspects of everyday life in the way we might need it to help us appreciate something scenically challenged in nature—such as a dead elk filled with crawling maggots.³ We already have the above-mentioned mediation of contemporary visual arts. (I do not intend to exclude the other fine art traditions here. The contemporary aural arts may do something similar with respect to the noises of everyday life. The contemporary novel often engages us descriptively and imaginatively with the same material represented in contemporary visual art.)

Kantian Attempt to Define Everyday Aesthetics

It might be thought that everyday aesthetics could be correlated with Kant’s notion of the agreeable. Kant says, That is agreeable which the senses find pleasing in the sensation.⁴ He distinguishes two kinds of aesthetic experience: the agreeable and the beautiful. Unlike beauty, the agreeable does not merely please, but gratifies. Thus, whereas beauty is disinterested, the agreeable is not. When we judge an object as agreeable we are expressing an interest in it. This is shown by the fact that it provokes a desire for similar objects. Although the agreeable may be experienced by irrational animals, Kant believes beauty is only available to man.

Kant argues that the agreeable is relative to inclination. Hence, the hungry man will find something agreeable that others may not. Taste, in the sense of discrimination, does not enter into the agreeable. The judgment of the agreeable rests, rather, on private feeling. As opposed to the beautiful, when we talk of the agreeable there is no disputing about tastes.

Kant seems to think there are specific kinds of things that are objects of the agreeable, for example, canary wine, violet color, and the smell of a rose. He speaks of the taste of the tongue, the palate, and the throat, and also of that which is agreeable to the eye and the ear. When he discusses violet color, he notes that it may be soft and lovely to one, and dull and faded to another. He also refers to the tones of wind and string instruments as examples of the agreeable. However, he insists that pure tones are objects of beauty.

Can the concept of the agreeable be used to define everyday aesthetics? Much of this domain could be included in the agreeable as Kant defines it; for example, all of the pleasures of the senses when they are unmediated by reflection. There are, however, various problems with a strictly Kantian definition of everyday aesthetics.

(1) Recent aestheticians have rightly questioned the idea that aesthetic appreciation can be completely disinterested, and that aesthetic objects can be completely formal. This has undercut Kant’s distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. For example, Kant’s view of disinterestedness implies that we do not want to hear more of some beautiful music after we have had one pleasurable experience of it. Yet, we often want to hear such pieces again and again, although perhaps not right away. How is this different from our desire to have more pieces of chocolate candy, although not right away?

(2) The concept of beauty should not be excluded from everyday aesthetics. Kant defines beauty in terms of play of