Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? (Foucault 1991, p. 350)
Introduction
When considering the career of the treatment of the topic of aesthetics (defined, hereafter, as the operationalization and application of form, taste, self-stylization, and the creative imagination to the demands of contemporary life) in the educational field, one is struck by a striking bifurcation. Mainstream and liberal curriculum standard-bearers such as Eliot Eisner (1997, 2005) writing on the topic have gone down the path of more or less insulating aesthetics within self-enclosing disciplinary frames of reference emphasizing self-referentiality, connoisseurship, and the maverick-like qualities of artistic producers. This orientation might be called, after Pierre Bourdieu, the “charismatic approach” (1993, p. 76) in which the artist and the aesthetic object are judged by art-qua-art criteria shorn from the social environment. Aesthetic conversations within this paradigm brush...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Aidi, H. (2014). Rebel music. New York: Random House.
Appadurai, A. (2013). The future as cultural fact: Essays on the global condition. New York: Verso.
Bauman, Z., & Raud, R. (2015). Practices of selfhood. Oxford: Polity.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia.
Eisner, E. (1997). The enlightened eye: Qualitative inquiry and the enhancement of educational practice (2nd ed.). London: Pearson.
Eisner, E. (2005). Reimagining schools: The selected works of Elliot W. Eisner. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1991). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 340–372). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hall, S., & Maharaj, S. (2001). Annotations: Modernity and difference, no. 6. London: Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA).
Jenkins, H. (2008). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University.
MacCannell, D. (2013). The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California.
Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global-economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Willis, P. (1981). Learning to labor. New York: Columbia University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore
About this entry
Cite this entry
McCarthy, C. (2016). Reconsidering Aesthetics and Everyday Life. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_80-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_80-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Online ISBN: 978-981-287-532-7
eBook Packages: Springer Reference EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education