Practical Aesthetics

Practical Aesthetics gathers contributions from both artists and theorists in what is presented as the first anthology of this emerging field. Its starting premise is that an artwork carries its own critical insight, a form of knowing that does not have to be conceptual or stated as propositions. Many current approaches sit between science and art, between sensory perception and argument, and between aesthetic and rational understanding, and they reason through artworks instead of simply describing them afterward.

The volume shows practitioners reasoning through film, sound, dance and literature, and it examines newer modes of aesthetic inquiry and presentation, including Media Philosophy, the audiovisual essay, fictocriticism, the audio paper and Artistic Research. A central argument is that writing about art can take on artistic or poetic qualities of its own, producing aesthetic effects rather than only reporting on them. Art here is treated as a subject with knowledge of its own, not as an object to be dissected from outside, and theory and practice shape one another into a shared "conceptual interference pattern."

On this account, practical aesthetics means reasoning alongside art in order to invent new worlds and to make the world perceptible in different ways.