1st Edition
Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life
This book presents interdisciplinary research on the aesthetics of perfection and imperfection. Broadening this growing field, it connects the aesthetics of imperfection with issues in areas including philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies.
The contributors to this volume argue that imperfection has value in being open and inclusive. The aesthetics of imperfection is typified by organic, unpolished production and the avoidance of perfect finish, instead representing living and natural change, and opposing the consumerist concern with the flawless and pristine. The chapters are divided into seven thematic sections. After the first section, on imperfection across the arts and culture, the next three parts are on imperfection in the arts of music, visual and theatrical arts, and literature. The second half of this book then moves to categories in everyday life and branches this further into body, self, and the person, and urban environments. Together, the chapters promote a positive ethos of imperfection that furthers individual and social engagement and supports creativity over mere passivity.
Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, literature, music, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies.
1. Imperfectionist Aesthetics, Broadening the Field and Clarifying the Definition
Peter Cheyne
I. Imperfection Across the Arts and Culture
2. Imperfectionist Aesthetics and the Inclusionist Ethos
Peter Cheyne
3. Imperfection and the Unfinished Work
Andy Hamilton
4. Art Proper, Perfectionism, and the Sacred Arts
Gordon Graham
II. Music
5. Revisiting the Aesthetics of Imperfection after Thirty-Five Years
Ted Gioia
6. Close Enough for Jazz: Imperfection and Jazz Improvisation
David Wild
7. A Social Aesthetics and Ethics of Imperfection: Insights from Karnatak Music, Jazz and Free Improvisation
Lara Pearson
III. Visual and Theatrical Arts
8. The Necessity of Imperfection: Philip Guston in the 1950s
Karen Lang
9. Thai Theatre and the Interplay of Perfection and Imperfection
Sirithorn Siriwan and Sarawanee Sukhumvada
10. Wabi-Sabi Aesthetic and Joseph Beuys’ Badewanne (1960)
Eda Keskin
IV. Literature
11. The Aesthetics of Weeds: A Case in Junzaburō Nishiwaki
Kaz Oishi and Yasuo Kobayashi
12. The Poetics of Ruins: Matsuo Basho and Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Comparative Study
Gregory Dunne
13. The Aesthetics of Perfection and Imperfection in Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Man
Fiona Tomkinson
14. The Triumph of Imperfection: Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’
Joseph S. O’Leary
V. Everyday Life
15. The Role of Imperfection in Consumer Aesthetics
Yuriko Saito
16. Imperfection and the Politics of Realism
Thomas Docherty
17. Everyday Encounters with Aesthetic Imperfection and Perfection
James Kirwan
18. Aesthetic Imperfection and Ethical Edification
Lucas Scripter
19. Collecting What? Collecting as an Everyday Aesthetic Act
Laura Di Summa
VI. Body, Self, and the Person
20. Bodies, Functions, and Imperfections
Sherri Irvin
21. Imperfection as a Vehicle for Fat Visibility in Popular Media
Cheryl Frazier
22. Imperfection and Beauty of Character
Glenn Parsons
23. The Self, Perfectionism, and the Value of Imperfection
Christopher Hamilton
VII. Urban Environments
24. Street Art, Graffiti, and Tags: The Value of Imperfection in Urban Aesthetics
Andrea Baldini
25. The Aesthetics of Imperfection and Architectural Design for Memorial Sites: Four Documentation Centres on National Socialism in Germany
Rumiko Handa
26. Urban Experience as Aesthetic Compromise
Sanna Lehtinen
27. Grit and Urban (Im)Perfection
Renee Conroy.
Index
Biography
Peter Cheyne is Associate Professor in British Literature and Culture, Shimane University, Japan, and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, UK. He is the author of Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy (2020). Additionally, he is the editor of Coleridge and Contemplation (2017) and co-editor, with Andy Hamilton and Max Paddison, of The Philosophy of Rhythm: Aesthetics, Music, Poetics (2020).
