Misko Suvakovic and Vladimir Mako (ed.). The Aesthetics of Architecture – Beyond Form. International Yearbook of Aesthetics. Volume 20. 2020
The selection of essays in the 19th Yearbook of the International Association for Aesthetics aims to analyse the phenomenon of retracing the past, i.e. of identifying the signs, details and processes of the creative re-interpretation of long-lasting traditions both in actual works of art and in aesthetic thought, hence where the historical interconnectedness and the influence of earlier sources can appear.
Zoltán Somhegyi is a Hungarian art historian with a PhD in aesthetics, based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and working as an Assistant Professor at the College of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Sharjah. As a researcher of art history and aesthetics, he is specialised in 18–19 century art and art theory. Apart from being an art historian of classical arts, his other fields of interest are contemporary fine arts and art market trends. He curated exhibitions in six countries, participated in international art projects and often lectures on art in academic conferences. He is Secretary General and Website Editor of the International Association for Aesthetics and Consultant of Art Market Budapest – International Contemporary Art Fair. He is the author of books, academic papers, artist catalogues and more than two hundred articles, essays, critiques, and art fair reviews.
The competition between philosophy and the arts can be traced back to the ancient times. In the Twentieth Century, this competition reached its culmination when art was pronounced reaching its end while aesthetics was declared irrelevant to the arts. Formalism abandoned the beautiful in aestheticism, Dadaism betrayed the autonomous or artistic merit in formalism, finally the contemporary conceptual art rejected the aesthetic, and so aesthetics or philosophy of art was totally expelled from the art world. Now we reach a historical stage where art and aesthetics are seeking for a reconciliation. The essays in this book show this new tendency in different ways.
Peng Feng is professor of aesthetics and art criticism at Peking University. He is also a playwright, freelance art critic and curator of exhibitions at international level. He has curated over 200 art exhibitions including the China Pavilion at the 54. international art exhibition of Venice Biennale 2011, The 1. International Sculpture Exhibition of Datong Biennale 2011, and The 1. International Art Exhibition of China Xinjiang Biennale. He has published 15 books including Return of Presence: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory (Beijing: China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Press, 2016); Arts Studies (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2016), Cross- Disciplines: The Adventure of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art (Beijing: Beijing Normal University Press, 2015); Modern Chinese Aesthetics (Nanjing: Fenghuang Press, 2013); Pervasion: China Pavilion at the 54. International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (Beijing: People’s Art Press, 2012); Introduction to Aesthetics (Shanghai: Fudan University, 2011); Return of Beauty: 11 Issues of Contemporary Aesthetics (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009); Perfect Nature (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005); The Western Aesthetics and the Western Art (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2005), and so on. Since 2013, his musical The Red Lantern has been travelling in China.
The 18th volume of the International Yearbook of Aesthetics comprises a selection of papers presented at the 19th International Congress of Aesthetics, which took place in Cracow in 2013. The Congress entitled “Aesthetics in Action” was intended to cover an extended research area of aesthetics going beyond the fine arts towards various forms of human practice. In this way it bore witness to the transformation that aesthetics has been undergoing for a few decades at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Krystyna Wilkoszewska is professor of philosophy and aesthetics and Head of the Department of Aesthetics at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. She is President of the Polish Society of Aesthetics and Director of John Dewey Research Center founded by her at the Jagiellonian University. She is a delegate in the Executive Committee in the International Association for Aesthetics and a member of Board in Central European Pragmatist Forum. She was awarded research grants from ACLS and Humboldt Foundation. Her main interest is in pragmatist philosophy and aesthetics, somaesthetics, postmodern philosophy and art, eco-aesthetics, transcultural studies. She published Art as the Rhythm of Life: Reconstruction of John Dewey’s Philosophy of Art; Postmodernism in Philosophy and Art and edited among others three volume Japanese Aesthetics; Vision and Revision; Transcultural Aesthetics; Aesthetics and Cultures. She is editor of the series: “Aesthetics in the World”, “Classics of Polish Aesthetics”.
IAA International Yearbook 2013 (Volume 17).
Jale Erzen & Raffaele Milani (eds.) Nature and the City. Beauty is Taking on a New Form.Sassari 2013.
The city, too, is landscape. We can leave it by going into nature exchanging the urban for the rural, but we can also enter the city to live within the architecture and contemplate its forms. Every architectural structure is a landscape and promotes an educational or paedeumatic relationship between the spirit and the environment. Our gaze and our bodies activate a certain way of contemplating that promotes the interchange between the external perception of the physical world and an internal seeing, which is the psychic perception of the visual image. There is a close relationship between the aesthetic experience of the natural environment and that of the urban landscape. In the same way that humankind lives on the earth so, too, it lives in the city.
The city, too, is landscape. We can leave it by going into nature exchanging the urban for the rural, but we can also enter the city to live within the architecture and contemplate its forms. Every architectural structure is a landscape and promotes an educational or paedeumatic relationship between the spirit and the environment. Our gaze and our bodies activate a certain way of contemplating that promotes the interchange between the external perception of the physical world and an internal seeing, which is the psychic perception of the visual image. There is a close relationship between the aesthetic experience of the natural environment and that of the urban landscape. In the same way that humankind lives on the earth so, too, it lives in the city.
The theme could be approached from various perspectives such as ‘nature/culture’, ‘city as human nature’, ‘ecology and the city’, symbols and metaphors, domesticated nature, nature interiorized, parks and natural environments, and other related issues.
Jale Nejdet Erzen (Izmir University), painter and art historian, publications on Ottoman architecture, painting and aesthetics. Vice president of IAA. Founder and long-time president of Turkish Association of Aesthetics, SAN ART. Affiliations, Middle East Technical University-Ankara and izmir University Izmir Turkey. Recent publications on urban aesthetics, contemporary art.
Raffaele Milani is Professor of Aesthetics and the author of numerous books, including The Aesthetic Categories, The Adventure of Landscape and The Faces of Grace. Philosophy, Art, and Nature. Director of the Laboratory of Research on the Cities (Institute for Advanced Studies), University of Bologna. Member of the European Commission at the French Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development on: De la connaissance des paysages à l’action paysagère.