Everyday Aesthetics

Everyday Aesthetics is a recent subfield of philosophical aesthetics focusing on everyday events, settings and activities in which the faculty of sensibility is saliently at stake. Alexander Baumgarten established Aesthetics as a discipline and defined it as scientia cognitionis sensitivae, the science of sensory knowledge, in his foundational work Aesthetica (1750). This field has been dedicated since then to the clarification of fine arts, beauty and taste only marginally referring to the aesthetics in design, crafts, urban environments and social practice until the emergence of everyday aesthetics during the ‘90s. As other subfields like environmental aesthetics or the aesthetics of nature, everyday aesthetics also attempts to countervail aesthetics' almost exclusive focus on the philosophy of art.

Aesthetic inquiry on everyday life owes much of its approach to John Dewey’s (1934) pragmatist aesthetics, even if he was interested in grounding mainly artistic experience. Dewey pointed at a variety of circumstances in which sensibility is present emphasizing the importance of feeling, energy, and rhythm in every creature’s intercourse with its environment. He thus stressed not only the artistic but the everyday doings and undergoings that involve alertness and intensity of experience. Dewey explored aesthetics from the subjects' experience rather than from objects' status as artworks and museum collections. This turn would allow overcoming object-centric approaches to aesthetics that hindered any consideration of the aesthetic beyond artistic and beautiful things justifiable by intrinsic qualities categorized as aesthetic.

The neglect of aesthetic theory to consider the role of sensibility in everyday life was first pointed out by Katya Mandoki who in 1994 coined the word Prosaics (drawing a distinction from Aristotle’s Poetics focused on art) to denote a sub-discipline that would specifically inquire the aesthetics involved in daily activities emphasizing the styles and forms of expression in face-to-face and context determined interactions. Prosaics or the theory of everyday aesthetics analyzes in this and subsequent texts the social conventions on what is considered acceptable or not by implicit standards of taste in each institutional setting (school, family, religion, politics, artworld, medical practice, sports). Six books and several articles i.e. Everyday Aesthetics; Prosaics, social identities and the play of culture (2007) consistently analyze the wide spectrum of the non-artistic within personal and collective experience. The role of the aesthetic is examined through symbolic interaction, identity negotiation and dramaturgical performance to produce specific sensitive effects and impact upon sensibility. As a multi-sensorial phenomenon, prosaics pays attention to the whole range of sensorial display for affecting participants' sensibility (body language, the visual, setting and props, intonation and styles of language) and not only sight and hearing as has been customary in aesthetics.

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