What is it about?
This paper reports on research undertaken into the ‘aesthetics of the everyday’. As well as the subject matter of aesthetic philosophy and art criticism, beauty and beautiful are of course very ordinary matters too. To shed light on the meanings of beauty as used in everyday practices and in natural language, we use the data collected in a qualitative study conducted with a group of low-income residents of the city of Milan. In this study we were interested in analysing their material lifestyle in terms of their relationship with aesthetics, i.e. with “beautiful” objects and/or experiences of them. Participants’ self-reported aesthetic appreciations suggest that conceptions of ‘beauty’ are used by these individuals as devices to narrate pieces of identity, memories, experiences, etc. In other words, aesthetics emerges as a set of practical activities of householders’ everyday life.
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Why is it important?
The paper is about the uses of aesthetic judgements in ordinary, everyday settings. In contrast to academic discourses about beauty and taste, it challenges the idea that beauty only resides in artworks or in the sublime and reports on a qualitative study in which people were talking about some of their possessions as "beautiful objects". In the article we try to investigate what they meant by this description.
Perspectives
I think of this article as a starting point for an investigation of the ordinary aesthetic attitude, moving from the idea that the wide vocabulary of aesthetics, when explored, provides interesting leads to investigate our relationships with the world of objects. When, among many objects surrounding us, we pick some as beautiful, we often resort to an aesthetic language to convey the emotional tie we entertain with it.
Dr Lucia Ruggerone
Robert Gordon University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Talking about Beauty: A Study of Everyday Aesthetics among Low-Income Citizens of Milan, Symbolic Interaction, June 2015, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/symb.166.
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