Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 54. Heft 2

When we talk about making the everyday world more aesthetically pleasing, we generally mean all attempts to enrich daily life with art, design and aesthetic aspects. But there also is a certain aesthetic dimension to the banality of daily life. In the first part of the essay, I suggest that two aspects dominate aesthetics in daily life: Beauty is in everyday life either short-term and peripheral or is that to which we are used and which is omnipresent. Either it is surprising but ungraspable or it is always with us but has long since lost its allure. In both cases it does not result in a strong aesthetic experience but in short-term aesthetic sensitivities that alternate between excitement and boredom, interest and disinterest, attention and ignorance. In the second part of the essay I examine what it means if demanding aesthetic and artistic concepts are confronted with everyday life. Art can either be seen as interrupting daily life or can be integrated into the ordinary. Then art must follow the rules of the ordinary and can only be perceived as peripheral. Still, beauty emerges as a decisive category in the aesthetics of everyday living.

Stamps are so familiar to us as everyday objects that we – with the exception of philatelists – are not used to considering their aesthetic value or their place in a history of art. They have therefore seldom been systematically investigated in this light. Nevertheless, these issues have been treated by some scholars. Aby Warburg, for instance, was one of the first to identify the importance of stamps for political iconography; and Walter Benjamin has also made insightful observations in this regard. This article takes up earlier work on the cultural history of the iconography of German money. It investigates exemplarily the presentation of the Brandenburg Gate on stamps of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the GDR, and the Federal Re- public of Germany, in order to elucidate more generally aesthetic forms of representation and their exploitation for purposes of propaganda.

If one wants to determine the relationship between ordinary life and art one has to start with the groundbreaking Kantian insight that the beautiful reflects the working of the human faculties of the understanding. However, I argue that the Kantian conception of aesthetic reflection is not satisfying, for Kant doesn’t succeed in explaining the objective purport of the aesthetic reflection. I resort to Hegel to resolve this problem. But his explanation, too, falls short of grasping the multiplicity of ways in which works of art make a contribution to a self- determined way of life. However, in Hegel there is a hint how to deal with this problem: Re- flection has to be understood as practical and not as cognitive. A conception of aesthetic reflexivity in terms of practical self-determination allows grasping that there is no gap between ordinary life and art.

Ludwig Wittgenstein found the conception of aesthetics as science of beauty ridiculous, because if that were the case, it would also have to explain which sort of coffee tastes well. This conception returns in the new aesthetics of the everyday, tuned up with eco-chic. My paper tries to explain how the concept of the everyday and that of a science of beauty are related; second, it intends to limit the claims of this dominant conception of aesthetics by arguments derived from the philosophy of art; and third, it wants to turn the attention to ways of production of the everyday, in which aesthetics is necessary to provide legitimacy. What is the function of aesthetics in the production of the everyday?

Die verstärkte Aufmerksamkeit, die Dingen und Artefakten neuerdings entgegengebracht wird, hat in der Folge dazu geführt, dass immer häufiger auch die Architekturen von Schulgebäuden auf ihre Effekte hin befragt werden. Dabei zeigt sich jedoch, dass es theoretisch wenig befriedigend ist, diese lediglich als sog. »dritte Erzieher« zu betrachten. Um deren Wirkungen zu erklären, werden häufig Anleihen bei ästhetischen Modellen gemacht. Diese Form der Interpretation versuchen wir in unserem Beitrag zu problematisieren, indem wir die ästhetischen Positionen Martin Seels und Jacques Rancières einander gegenüberstellen und diskutieren. Wie sich Schularchitekturen künftig interpretieren lassen, ohne von schlichten Wirkungsannahmen auszugehen und ohne die Gruppe ihrer »Benutzer« zu unterschlagen, zeigen wir abschließend an ausgewählten Beispielen.

Horror – that is the invasion of something unbearable. In many films its starting point is a common, even idyllic every-day-scene: in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, we see an ear lying on a freshly mowed lawn which is surrounded by an immaculate white fence. In the following I raise the question if the common place could be seen as the breeding ground for the unbearable rather than serving as a contrast to the invasion of it. What if the endless repetition of every- day-life itself quietly generates the monsters and their excesses as a kind of antidote and wake- up-call for the lethargy and lifelessness which creeps upon ordinary people in their ordinary lives? Should this motif work, then one finds rather surprising structural common features across the genre boundaries such as from a horror film to its apparent antipode, the romantic comedy (Pretty Woman meets Norman Bates).

At first trust plays a fundamental role within the social sphere. Accordingly, trust serves as philosophical term above all in Political, Social, and Moral Philosophy. But it is also central in recent Sociology and Psychology. Referring to these disciplines, the relationship of trust be- tween viewer and hero on the screen can be called ›parasocial‹, as-if-interaction. In contrast, ontological trust is of particular interest for recent philosophy of film. Instead of explaining it, following Deleuze, in terms of a metaphysics of cinema it seems to be more adequate to com- bine the different subject-specific answers in Kant’s concept of play. Aesthetic experiences then are encouraging us in the attitude to act as if there could be trust in the world.

Today, the word ›icon‹ usually no longer refers to the icons of the Christian church, but to the icons of the modern mass-culture. Both sorts of icons play a key-role in the recent discussion about art: Either art is supposed to be a descendant of the religious icon, a phenomenon that gives us a singular visual experience of the Absolute. On the other hand, art is supposed to be just one class among others in the wide world of the secular icons. In contrast to these two positions this essay contends that modern art comprehends aspects of transcendent as well as of immanent icons. Furthermore, it argues that at the same time it is characteristic for our notion of art to suppose a contrast between art and icon. This contrast is based on a specific reflectivity of art, which marks a categorical difference between art and both sorts of icons.