I.  Introduction 

            Recent decades have witnessed a dramatic broadening in the scope of aesthetic inquiry.  No longer focused exclusively on the arts and natural beauty, the mainstream of aesthetics has entered a delta in which its flow has spread out into many channels before entering the oceanic expanse that is Western civilization.  Several decades ago, environmental aesthetics began to attract interest and has grown to be an important focus of present-day inquiry in aesthetics.  Along with environmental ethics, it has become part of the broader range of environmental studies and the environmental movement in general.  This expansion has continued, interpreting environment not only as natural but also as social.  Aesthetics has been applied to social relations and political uses, and now, most recently to the objects and situations of everyday life.  The course of the arts has displayed a similar succession of changes over the past century and a half, increasingly rejecting traditional paradigms of representation and incorporating into their subject-matter and practices the everyday world, along with active participation by their audience.  It would seem that art has overstepped all boundaries, boundaries between art and non-art, between artist and perceiver, between art and life.  Some might say that it has lost its identity entirely.

            Scholars committed to the study of the fine arts and traditional forms of natural beauty may consider this enlargement of the arts and extension of aesthetics a corruption of the traditional standards of those endeavors.  This, of course, ignores the fact that, as an area of scholarship, aesthetics is of comparatively recent origin, only beginning with Baumgarten’s Aesthetica in 1750.  Less dogmatic scholars may take these changes as worth inquiry in their own right, perhaps signifying a change in the condition of aesthetics. I should like the follow the second course here, for I think that these developments reflect not only greater inclusiveness but a fundamental alteration in the nature of aesthetic inquiry.  Put most directly and succinctly, this expansion changes the field of aesthetics from an aesthetics of objects to an aesthetics of experience, an aesthetics of sensibility.  This essay proposes an account of how this has come about and what it signifies.

II.  The transformations of art

            Developments in the visual arts since the late nineteenth century display a fascinating succession of movements and styles.  Among the most notable movements are Impressionism, Post-impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Abstract Art,  Pop Art, Op Art, and Conceptual Art.  These have provided a surprising array of treasures for the museum-goer and rich material for the art historian.  The changes seem to puzzle the mind much as they dazzle the eye, posing seemingly bizarre innovations that present insoluble obstacles to efforts at understanding the meaning of modern art and frustrating attempts at determining its boundaries.  This history is, however, more than a series of changes in style, and these changes display more than degrees and variations in representation and abstraction.  Let us look more closely at this succession of movements to see if there is some underlying logic to their sequence.

            Impressionism , to begin, is usually explained as an attempt at capturing the fleeting effects of light, especially sunlight, on objects and landscapes.  Things seem to lose their solidity and appear to vibrate with solar energy, dissolving into vaguely-defined, multi-colored hues as the atmosphere is charged by sunlight.  With Post-impressionism  , objects regained solidity and radiated a strong presence, while Fauvism  flourished with untamed brushwork and intense hues.  In Expressionism objects were colored in the rich tones of powerful emotion, but this was then replaced by the dissolution of solidity into the geometrical structures of Cubism , sometimes broken up into their parts, rendered multi-perspectivally, or made transparent by displaying their inner structure.  Futurism, in contrast, transmuted the solidity of objects into the disconcerting dynamism of frenetic motion.  With the iconoclasm of Dada, ridicule was cast at the once noble objects of artistic idealization and bourgeois contentment by introducing the prosaic and irreverent into the sanctorum of art, while Surrealism  transformed the world of ordinary objects into the bizarre distortions and irrational juxtapositions of dreams. 

            As the visual arts became emancipated from the constraints of representation, the figurative center of  art was increasingly abandoned.  Its representational subject-matter became unimportant and the purely pictorial elements of hue, texture, form, and composition became the source of rich originality.  Artists forsook any attempt at capturing the world of objects, and used color and form for their visual effect alone.  One could consider Pop Art  the antithesis of abstraction, where common objects and commercialized forms take center stage larger than life, or it could be the apotheosis of abstraction, presenting stylized illustrations as pure pictorialism.  Abstraction reappeared in the subtle variation of repeated simple forms for their pulsating effect on the eye, ingeniously exploited by Op Art , while in Conceptual Art  the object disappeared from space and became only an imaginative construction. 

            This kaleidoscopic survey of the modern course of the visual arts verges on caricature, but it nonetheless reveals a fascinating process of transfiguration.  In this succession of movements one may see imaginative transmutations of the art object under the influence of light, of the eye, of emotion, and of dreams, along with varying degrees of manipulation of the object’s structure, its solidity, and its variability under the influence of thought and imagination.  This is often seen as a history of the iconoclasm of the modern artist, constantly defying conventional expectations and traditional modes.  That turns it into an account of art movements that increasingly reject traditional paradigms and incorporate the everyday world and the participation of the viewer.  This history could then be read as an account of the vagaries of artistic imagination coupled with the unbridled irreverence of the artist.  To be sure, one can often find such expressions in manifestations of the artistic temperament and its inclination to notoriety. 

            However, I should like to suggest another, very different reading. This is to consider the course of modern art as a narrative of transformation, not of objects, but of experiences.  Indeed, these developments signify a shift from object-based art to experience-based art.  The account displays not so much a sequence of distorted or abandoned objects as a progressive sequence of ways of seeing.  The object becomes less important as the visual effect increases in significance until, in abstract and conceptual art, the object disappears entirely.  From its dissolution into light and color in Impressionism, the tactile sense of its pure physicality and weight in Post-Impressionism, its transformation into a stimulus for evoking an emotional response in Expressionism, its structural dissolution in Cubism, its physical dissolution into movement in Futurism, its transition into parody in Dada, its oneiric transmutation in Surrealism and into an ocular stimulus in Op Art, its disappearance in abstract art in favor of the sensibility of pictorial qualities, the lampooning effect of its parody in Pop Art – all these have made the object less important or not important at all.  In its place is art’s effect on the spectator. 

            But to put it this way is actually misleading because it masks a crucial difference:  the audience in art is no longer a spectator but has become rather a participant and co-creator, absorbing the visual or textual materials, responding physically at times to its stimulation, and intellectually as well as emotionally to its social critique, as in Futurism’s glorification of war and Dada’s critique of bourgeois society, and by its participation in the creative process, activating the art object.  It is essential to understand that this transformation in the arts did not turn appreciation into pure subjectivity, into psychological effects disconnected from the body, the art work, and the situation.  Rather these arts demanded sharpened awareness and acute perceptual attention to their sensible qualities.  They required recognizing the effects of art as conscious body experience:  physical as well as mental.  Often this was required by the perceptual demands of the art work for active participation in an appreciative process that collaborates with the artistic one.  Indeed, these traditionally separate functions were fused in experiencing art.  We have, in short, the transformation of an art of objects into an art of experiences.   What does all this signify?  To respond to this question, let me turn to the scholarly analogue of the artistic process.

III.  The transformations of aesthetic inquiry

            While art has undergone a series of transformative changes, aesthetic theory has largely remained mired in the framework and concepts of the eighteenth century, grounded mainly in Kant’s aesthetics.  I have written at length elsewhere about the persistence of obsolescent concepts such as aesthetic disinterestedness, contemplation, purposiveness without purpose, the quest for universality, and the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments, as well as questioning distinctions such as pure and adherent beauty, the sensible and the supersensible, and aesthetics and morality.[1]  Important as these ideas may have been two centuries ago in establishing aesthetics within the framework of a systematic philosophy and giving legitimacy and independence to the arts, these concepts have become increasingly irrelevant to the actual practices of artists and the appreciative experiences of the art public. 

            Despite being constrained by outmoded and irrelevant aesthetic concepts, aesthetic inquiry has, in recent decades, pursued a number of directions that reflect the expanded scope of the arts and aesthetic appreciation.  And the art public has been increasingly willing to accept the use of innovative art materials and the widening range of art experiences that extend beyond the museum or concert hall and into the home, the workplace, the street, and the field.  More significant still is the complete alteration of aesthetic appreciation from the receptive contemplation of objects to an active aesthetic engagement with the materials and conditions of art works.  Nor is it any longer clear or even possible to separate aesthetic value from moral value, as the social significance and uses of art and the aesthetic have come into greater prominence.  Further, the increasingly political applications of the arts belies their traditional exclusivity.

            Along with the innovative approaches of the arts has come an enlargement of the scope of aesthetic experiences, and new scholarly interests have emerged over the last several decades.  Among these are environmental aesthetics, the aesthetics of politics, social aesthetics, including relational aesthetics, and everyday aesthetics.  The progressive broadening in the scope of aesthetic inquiry and away from the conventional venues of art began, I think, largely by focusing attention on the aesthetics of environment.[2]  It started with a return of attention to nature and an exploration of modes and conditions of appreciation that differ greatly from the disinterested contemplation of distant scenes.  Walking in the woods, paddling a stream, hiking in a wilderness, driving down a highway or along a rural road in an agricultural landscape, and sailing a boat became recognized as occasions for aesthetic pleasure, occasions where an intrinsic part of the enjoyment lay in entering into some activity in the landscape.  At the same time, recognition grew that aesthetic engagement in environment embraces more than the appreciation of nature, for a large part of environmental experience in the developed world takes place in cities.  Urban aesthetics began to enter into environmental discourse, and including the built environment expanded the conditions and possibilities of appreciation.  Even outer space became a subject for aesthetic awareness.[3]

            Recognizing an aesthetic interest in environment has had powerful implications for aesthetic inquiry more generally, for aesthetics has become concerned not only with art objects but with aesthetic situations.  And this shift was not only a conceptual one but a material one:  the focus of appreciation was no longer on a discrete object but on a situation, and the traditional dualistic assumption of Western philosophy that considered appreciation a subjective response to an external object became increasingly inappropriate and challenged.  I have proposed replacing this model with the concept of aesthetic engagement to reflect the embeddedness of the appreciator in every environmental context.  A related development is the formulation primarily by Chinese environmental aestheticians of ecological aesthetics or eco-aesthetics.[4]

            Once environment gained aesthetic legitimacy, it led to other enlargements of the venues of aesthetic appreciation.  One of these lies in discerning aesthetic values in social contexts, where the aesthetic is found in situations involving different forms of human relationships, such as friendship, family, and love.  Aesthetic values are present in other associations as well, but often in a negative form.  Indeed, negative aesthetic values are common in commercial situations, voluntary associations and, indeed, even forms of social relations.  Such contexts have led to recognizing perceptual experiences that are common in social situations as negative in character.  Identifying such forms of aesthetic negativity as aesthetic affront, aesthetic pain, and aesthetic depravity has led to broadening the scope of aesthetics to include negative values.  And because these values identify harmful practices, aesthetics merges with ethics to form a basis for social criticism.[5]

            A similar development is the idea of relational aesthetics developed by the French critic Nicolas Bourriaud.[6]  Applied to the work of a number of contemporary artists, relational aesthetics recognizes that their art creates a social space, a context for human relationships.  The art work then becomes an occasion for human interactions and the audience is turned into a community.[7]  This is a development in the understanding of aesthetic experience, but under the influence of traditional aesthetics, the art world has co-opted the insight of relational aesthetics by the practice of replacing the term ‘relational aesthetics’ with ‘relational art,’ thus turning a situation into an object and entirely missing the point. of relational aesthetics.  The insight of relational aesthetics remains valid, nevertheless.

            Political aesthetics is yet another broadening of inquiry closely allied with social aesthetics.  Jacques Ranciére has called attention to the political implications of sensibility:  its distribution, its control, and its uses, and he has developed this in the service of an argument for radical democracy.[8]  Going about this from another direction, Crispin Sartwell has interpreted the force of political ideology from the fact that it is actually an aesthetic system, and he sees politics promoting its goals by creating an aesthetic environment.[9]  Employing similar materials, Davide Panagia has related the force of an idea to the bodily sensations that accompany it.  He finds sensation at the source of political thought and the aesthetic as the source of political action.[10]  My own recent work has joined closely both the social and the political implications of the aesthetic.   Recognizing that the heart of the aesthetic lies in sensibility, I have claimed that developing the awareness and capacity of aesthetic sensibility leads to immensely broader and richer social experience.  At the same time, through an awareness of negative aesthetics and the negative sublime, aesthetic sensibility provides a powerful tool for criticism by recognizing the human consequences of exploitative commercial and political practices.[11]

            Perhaps the most recent direction to emerge from the liberation and expansion of aesthetic experience is what is known as the aesthetics of everyday life.  Although there is presently a flowering of work on everyday aesthetics, the possibility of aesthetic gratification in ordinary objects and events has long been known, even if degraded by prevalent philosophical theory.  Widely valued by poets, especially Romantic  poets and those in Asian traditions, the aesthetic in everyday situations has also been recognized by novelists, as well.[12]   It may be most convenient, though, to locate its contemporary intellectual origins in John Dewey’s Art as Experience.[13]  In that book Dewey argued against the separation of art from life by basing aesthetic experience on the biological and cultural conditions of human life.  He located the aesthetic, not in an internalized awareness of sensation and feeling, but in “a complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events.”[14]  Further, Dewey maintained that “the esthetic…is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience.”[15]

            I shall not attempt a chronology of the development of the present interest in the aesthetics of everyday life.  Instead, let me mention some significant stages in its emergence.  An important source came from the innovations that were occurring in the arts in the mid-twentieth century.   A prime influence was the work of the American composer and theorist, John Cage.  Experimental and innovative, Cage’s interest in aleatoric (chance) music became widely known through his piano work of 1952,  4’33”, which consisted entirely in the chance occurrence of audible sounds that occurred during that interval of time.  Happenings, a predecessor of present-day performance art that originated in the 1950s, eliminated the separation between the art work and the viewer, who became a participant in the work, which often comprised the unscripted, chance events of an ordinary situation. 

            Such innovative developments in the arts had a profound effect on concurrent work in aesthetics.   Beginning in the 1990s, a series of steps in the expansion of aesthetic appreciation were taken that resolutely rejected the traditional separation of art from life activities, in the conviction that the scope of the arts has no limits.  Two books published in 1992 made an extended case for a broader and more inclusive understanding of the aesthetic that incorporated all activities within the purview of art.  David Novitz’s The Boundaries of Art ^[16] abjured all limits to art and extended the aesthetic to personal and social relationships, and from these to politics.  My book, Art and Engagement,^[17] extended an argument I had first made in 1970 for reconstructing aesthetics under the influence of innovative developments in the contemporary arts.[18] The argument explored the philosophical implications of considering aesthetic appreciation in both traditional and contemporary arts as active perceptual engagement.  Two decades later, my book elaborated a theoretical position for the enlargement of aesthetic experience that would include the objects and events of daily life based on the practices and experience of the arts, themselves. 

            Since these publications, there has been a proliferation of work developing and detailing the unbridled extension of the aesthetic.  The aesthetics of everyday life is the most recent stage of this progressive broadening in the scope of aesthetic inquiry that had begun with environmental aesthetics, and important work has already appeared.  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, a collection published in 1995, included essays on such topics as social aesthetics, the aesthetics of place, unplanned building, landscape, sport, weather, smells and tastes, and food.[19]  Katya Mandoki’s Everyday Aesthetics of 2007 was the first extended treatment of the subject.[20]  An English-language version of a book that had originally been published in Spanish in 1994, Mandoki’s Everyday Aesthetics is a far-reaching study of aesthetic theory of unusual scope and originality centering around the crucial role of aesthetics in the contemporary highly technological and complex societies in which we now live.  This was soon followed by another volume with the same title and an equally distinctive and original focus, Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics.[21]   Richly informed by the author’s native Japanese culture and her long experience teaching at a school of art and design, this book details the pervasive presence and influence of the aesthetic over the many facets of everyday life, remarkable and unremarkable alike.  The most recent addition to these extended treatments is Thomas Leddy’s The Extraordinary in the Ordinary:  The Aesthetics of Everyday Life.[22]  Leddy develops an extensive critical review of much of the literature, as well as the current scholarly debates, leading to his own contribution in the form of a phenomenologically-oriented approach to aesthetics.  He proposes the concept of ‘aura’ to identify the quality an object can have when experienced as aesthetic.  It is a quality that is not confined to art objects but to the culturally-conditioned experiences of daily life. 

IV.  Conclusion:  The transformations of aesthetic theory

            I have depicted a broad landscape on these pages, rather like one of Constable’s wall-sized canvases, and I hope it shares their realism in its theoretical and historical perspective on developments in art and aesthetics.  For besides the greater range of interests and applications in aesthetics, these developments have demonstrated the obsolescence of traditional concepts.   Let me suggest some implications that seem to emerge from the trends in aesthetic experience and theory I have been detailing here.  Although the authors I have mentioned may not subscribe to all of the ideas I shall offer in my conclusion, I think that the developments to which they have contributed support this transformation of aesthetics.

            To begin, it is clear that there is a sharp dislocation between the practices of many contemporary artists, their art works, and the experience and behavior of the art public, and with modern aesthetic theory, especially as it has been formulated under the influence of Kant.  That theory is grounded in a separation between the subjectivity of aesthetic experience and the objectivity of the art object, in a separation between beauty and utility, and in the sequestering of the arts and natural beauty in museums and privileged views and away from the ordinary course of human life activities.  While such a theory may be thought to honor the special aesthetic forcefulness of the noblest artistic creations, it does so at the expense of severely constricting the scope of aesthetic appreciation, and that belies the prevalence of aesthetic value in human cultures.  Is it possible to have a theoretical frame that retains the validity of the sacred experience of great art and awesome natural scenes while, at the same time, recognizing and accounting for the fact that aesthetic interests pervade every domain of human experience? 

            I believe that it is possible and that we need concepts that can accommodate both in proper proportion.  These can be developed by enlarging the scope and understanding of aesthetics.  First, we need to overcome the fragmentation that results from the many divisions drawn by traditional theory, such as between the appreciator of art and the art object, between beauty and utility, and between cognitive and non-cognitive experience.  We need, in fact, a unifying concept that can admit connections, mutual influences, and reciprocity without losing the aesthetic altogether.  Such a concept may be found in the notion of an aesthetic field, an idea that embodies the understanding that the presence and functioning of aesthetic values occur in a context that encompasses the principal factors in the experience of aesthetic value.  The aesthetic field can accommodate artistic innovation and expanded appreciative occasions for appreciation along with traditional arts, for it enfolds the four functional constituents present in all:  the objective, the appreciative, the  creative, and the performative, none of which can be taken independently of the others.[23] 

            The central idea in appreciation now becomes aesthetic engagement, which recognizes the participation that active appreciation requires and that the contemporary arts increasingly demand.  We also need to recognize that the art object is no longer the sole repository of aesthetic value and to accept that it need not occupy an elevated status.  For now the art work can be something of ordinary use or no object at all but a perceptual experience or even only an idea.  Nor need it be complete and polished but simply a processive event, like much of daily life.  The context of appreciation has also changed along with the unity of the art object, both of which now share the incompleteness of ordinary experience.  That is why the human environment  has become the wider locus of the aesthetic and the context in which specific questions need to be asked and considered.  We need to discern this new landscape of aesthetics.