How Does an Aesthetic Object Happen? Emergence, Disappearance, Multiplicity

Abstract

In studying visual and plastic arts, social researchers tend to assume that an aesthetic object is pre-given to a viewer who does not participate in the process of the object’s becoming. They problematise the aesthetic status of an artwork, but not its objectness. This article shows that audience perception, considered as interaction and situated practice, does not merely define the meanings and emotions attached to a certain object, but plays a constitutive role in the object’s physical state and its very existence as an object, i.e. as an integrated unity extracted from its surroundings and affording a direct, intensive encounter. Synthesising the conceptual resources of Hennion’s pragmatics of taste, Simmel’s aesthetic theory, gestalt theory, and social phenomenology, I explain various ways an object in the situation of perception happens and achieves a certain mode of existence or fails to happen and disappears. The article is based on three empirical examples derived from the ethnographic study of the open-air land art/architectural festival ‘Archstoyanie’. The first case illustrates how an object is extracted from the environment and the festival’s infrastructure; the second, how the visitors destroy the incomplete boundaries of an object so that it dissolves into the surroundings; and the third, how an object maintains its integrity despite its inner complexity and multiple centres that attract the visitor’s attention.

Maintenance work: Interrogating the sociology of art

“…Various art sociologists make claims towards a “new” sociology of art resulting in an ever‐changing research field (Acord & DeNora, 2008; DeNora, 2000; de la Fuente, 2007; Eyerman & Ring, 1998; Fox, 2015; Hennion & Grennier, 2001; Kobyshcha, 2018; Strandvad, 2012; Schwarz, 2013; Zolberg, 1990 and 2015) to find ways to bring art closer to the social sciences and to break from the previous paradigms’ assumptions. Even further by labeling the recent call for a “new” as a “dawn” or that the sociology of art is at a “crossroads” (de la Fuente, 2007, p. 409; de la Fuente, 2019, p. 475).…”

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

“…We need to trace out how the messy and disorderly social experience becomes meaningful via social institutions of production and reception. We need to recognize how the understanding mediated by a literary piece “is becoming” (Kobyshcha, , p. 2f) in an actual engagement between the text and its aesthetic literary devices, the experience of its author (production) and its reader (reception), and their respective socio‐historical backgrounds. We can refer to Goldmann's genetic structuralism to see how both the social and the aesthetic interact in a patterned and meaningful, yet dynamic and ever‐changing way.…”

Aesthetic Objects, Aesthetic Judgments and the Crafting of Organizational Style in Creative Industries

“…Such references fit Fine's (1992Fine's ( , p. 1269 definition "as an object (or act) that is intended to produce a sensory response in an audience." Similarly, while Kobyshcha (2018) highlights the role of external actors (perception of audiences) in contributing to art objects' becoming, they never explicitly define aesthetic objects as such, instead treating them as simply synonymous with a "piece of art." Dobson (2010, p. 396), in turn, uses the expression in his investigation of style and its role in "experiencing the firm as a unified aesthetic object."…”