In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler. Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription on the UNESCO (...) register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance. (shrink)

This chapter addresses fictional narratives as a specific kind of fiction capable of eliciting particular effects on their recipients. The first section of the chapter considers the status of climate fiction (cli-fi) as a literary genre, and identifies a set of standard properties that qualify most works in the category. The second section addresses the specific fictional engagement prompted by cli-fi and discusses its relationship with thought experiments. The third section examines, from a psychological angle, whether and how climate narratives (...) can induce changes in the recipients’ beliefs and attitudes toward environmental issues. The chapter closes by listing some of the research questions raised by cli-fi that still await exploration. In the conclusion, it is tentatively suggested that, although the experience of consuming cli-fi will not change the planet, it might nonetheless heighten recipients’ concerns and willingness to take action against climate change. (shrink)

Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a housewife from South-London, was one of the most famous mediums of her time. Throughout her lifetime, famous composers such as Liszt, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy and Chopin sought her from the realm of the dead to dictate their posthumous compositions. Brown’s ‘received’ musical pieces became a case study for musicians and psychologists. None, however, ever came up with a convincing explanation for the pieces’ existence. Rather than being a story of sheer madness or clairvoyance, in this paper (...) I read Brown’s musical forgeries as a ‘testament’ to twentieth‐century Western culture’s fascination with originality and the cult of genius. Ideologies of authorship and authenticity shape our aesthetic appreciation, so that music’s essential value is for us more than just ‘sounding good’. Drawing on recent philosophical discussion in aesthetics, I question this cultural framework by scrutinizing the concept of artistic creativity. It is because art is a form of creative achievement that history and provenance count as central factors of our evaluation. This, in turn, may reveal us something about the value of musical forgeries. (shrink)

Applying Aesthetics to Everyday Life surveys current debates in the field of everyday aesthetics, examining its history, methodology and intersections with cognate research areas. Lisa Giombini and Adrián Kvokacka bring together an international team of renowned scholars who are shaping the present and future of the discipline. They demonstrate how the historical origins of everyday aesthetics emerges across the history of Western aesthetic thought, from Renaissance thinkers to the modern German philosophers Baumgarten, Kant and Heidegger. Chapters shed light on the (...) field's methodological underpinnings, tracing its theoretical foundations back to epistemology and ethics and assess the potential of everyday aesthetics as a theoretical tool. They reveal its interdisciplinary nature and how it assists various fields of inquiry, including environmental and urban aesthetics, conservation ethics and the philosophy of art. Through fresh explorations of its origins, background and contemporary developments, this collection advances a new definition of everyday aesthetics and provides a cutting edge reflection on the world we inhabit today. (shrink)

Over the past few decades debates in the field of conservation have called into question the suppositions underpinning contemporary restoration theory and practice. Restorers seem to base their choices on implicit ideas about the authenticity, identity and value of works of art, ideas that need to undergo a more systematic theoretical evaluation. I begin by focusing on the question of whether authenticity is fully established in the process of the creation of an artwork: namely, at its initial point of existence. (...) One’s interpretation of what makes an artwork authentic will indeed greatly influence how to go about preserving or restoring it. If the answer to the question is affirmative, one commits to the idea that authenticity is determined by the work’s creator; thus, it is considered a given, exempt from historical flux. If the answer is negative, one takes authenticity to be a combination of initial creation and temporal change; in this sense the work is considered a ‘historical being’. These two conceptions, in turn, come from opposite ontological perspectives on the identity of artworks. Neither of them, however, proves to be truly convincing. I argue that from the point of view of conservation theory we need to consider artworks neither like physical objects nor like living beings, but rather like social objects in Searle’s sense. To this extent, safeguarding authenticity in conservation goes hand in hand with preserving a work’s continuity through enhancing what I call its structural and aesthetic readability. Restoration is thus in its essence a critical act of interpretation which has more to do with the various meanings of an artwork than with its hypothetical original conditions. Rather than just being a win-or-lose affair, authenticity turns out to be the result of a complex set of mutually interacting variables. (shrink)

In this short paper, I examine the notion of everyday heritage as developed by Lisa Giombini in her article Everyday Heritage and Place-Making. While I argue that the article’s main contribution is to combine the literature on place-making with current debates in everyday aesthetics, I also highlight some of the issues that I think should be addressed to further refine the notion of ‘everyday heritage’ and make it more resistant to criticism.

In this paper, I investigate one popular view in current methodological debate about musical ontology, namely, descriptivism. According to descriptivism, the task of musical ontology is to offer a description of the ‘structure of our thought’ about musical works, as it manifests itself in actual musical practices. In this regard, descriptivists often appeal to our pre-theoretical intuitions to ground ontological theories of musical works. This practice, however, is worrisome, as such intuitions are unstable and contradictory. For example, there is a (...) broad variety of intuitions in our musical practice concerning what counts as an authentic performance of a musical work. All such intuitions reflect at least a part of actual practice; however, they are in conflict with each other. This raises a problem, for how can they thus represent a reliable basis for our ontology? A further worry for descriptivism concerns the triviality of the knowledge it gives us access to. If, according to descriptivism, the task of musical ontologists is simply to codify the regularities found in our intuitive thought or discourse about practice, then how can the resulting theories be informative at all with regard to the object of their concern? (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate one popular view in current methodological debate about musical ontology, namely, descriptivism. According to descriptivism, the task of musical ontology is to offer a description of the ‘structure of our thought’ about musical works, as it manifests itself in actual musical practices. In this regard, descriptivists often appeal to our pre-theoretical intuitions to ground ontological theories of musical works. This practice, however, is worrisome, as such intuitions are unstable and contradictory. For example, there is a (...) broad variety of intuitions in our musical practice concerning what counts as an authentic performance of a musical work. All such intuitions reflect at least a part of actual practice; however, they are in conflict with each other. This raises a problem, for how can they thus represent a reliable basis for our ontology? A further worry for descriptivism concerns the triviality of the knowledge it gives us access to. If, according to descriptivism, the task of musical ontologists is simply to codify the regularities found in our intuitive thought or discourse about practice, then how can the resulting theories be informative at all with regard to the object of their concern? (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate one popular view in current methodological debate about musical ontology, namely, descriptivism. According to descriptivism, the task of musical ontology is to offer a description of the ‘structure of our thought’ about musical works, as it manifests itself in actual musical practices. In this regard, descriptivists often appeal to our pre-theoretical intuitions to ground ontological theories of musical works. This method, however, is worrisome, as such intuitions are unstable and contradictory. For example, there is a (...) broad variety of intuitions in our musical practice concerning what counts as an authentic performance of a musical work. All such intuitions reflect at least a part of actual practice; however, they are in conflict with each other. This raises a problem, for how can they thus represent a reliable basis for our ontology? A further worry for descriptivism concerns the triviality of the knowledge it gives us access to. If, according to descriptivism, the task of musical ontologists is simply to codify the regularities found in our intuitive thought or discourse about practice, then how can the resulting theories be informative at all with regard to the object of their concern? (shrink)

In this paper, I combine sources from environmental psychology with insights from the everyday aesthetics literature to explore the concept of ‘everyday heritage’, formerly introduced by Saruhan Mosler. Highlighting the potential of heritage in its everyday context shows that symbolic, aesthetic, and broadly conceived affective factors may be as important as architectural, historical, and artistic issues when it comes to conceiving of heritage value. Indeed, there seems to be more to a heritage site than its official inscription on the UNESCO (...) register. A place is included as part of our heritage primarily because it matters to us. People live in, form relationships with, and derive existential and affective meanings from it. Above and beyond its official significance, a heritage site is thus a living dimension that plays a vital role in the everyday life and social practices of people, who transform it into a place of human significance. (shrink)

What kind of art is performance art? In what sense – if any – can it be defined? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions by drawing on the category of ‘performative gesture’. One crucial manifestation of the character of performance art is the way it challenges our traditional ideas about what art is. A pivotal point is that performance art does not hold up to the traditional notion of artistic creativity as either a process of ‘production’ or (...) ‘reproduction’. It is rather committed to putting the focus of artistic creativity on a special kind of gestures, differing from both the gestures of traditional art and from the gestures of theater. Performative gestures do not ‘bring anything into being’; analogously, they do not ‘mimic’ nor ‘represent’. Instead, they suggest the worrying idea that everything and anything can be considered art: not only every object, but even every ordinary act in everyday life. In this sense, performance art attempts at blurring the boundaries between art and life. (shrink)