Aesthetics and Education: An ill-matched couple?

Abstract

Not too long ago the concept of aesthetics was restricted to the fine arts. The cleavage between ‘high’ (or ‘fine’) and ‘low’ (or ‘popular’) culture was obvious, as was the gulf between on the one hand, verbalised aesthetic values within the cultural establishment, and on the other hand popular taste and implicit/acted out ‘aesthetic’ preferences within most youth cultures.

Since then we have seen and heard frequent rapprochements and mixings of ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ art forms. The concept of aesthetics has broadened, as it is dependent on societal changes and on our definitions of culture and art. If the concept once ‘belonged’ exclusively to philosophers and art scholars, today authors from various disciplines write about the subject, sometimes so far from the fine arts as the aesthetics of soccer and other sport games, body aesthetics (tatooing, piercing etc) and (mostly spelled without an ‘a’), esthetic surgery or dentistry. Some attempts to discuss the concept and its definitions might therefore be appropriate in this current issue of IJME.