Dao Academy

CoursesCourse 29

Life as art: the aestheticization of everyday life

Aesthetics began by building a wall: beauty was something to look at, never to use, and art stayed on its own side of the footlights. This course follows what happened to that wall: how modern art pressed against it, how rich societies came to treat almost everything, from buildings and brands to news and bodies, as a matter of style, what the critics fear in that, and what it might mean to treat a whole life, rather than a thing, as the work.

Start lesson 1

Lessons

  1. 1 The wall at the edge of the stageIn 1758 Diderot told actors to imagine a wall between themselves and the audience. How art came to be kept apart from life, who complained about the wall, and how a stare, a urinal, a flat patch of paint, and a Japanese print tested it. 23 minCompleted
  2. 2 When everything can be styledA need can be filled and a wish cannot. What changes when a society has met its needs: buildings, brands, bodies, and news all become things to be designed, and a presidential election becomes a story that has to end. 26 minCompleted
  3. 3 The critics, and a replyThe charge that beauty can be a form of control is older than the word, and it has several versions. What the critics said and what survives of it, what is documented and what is not, and the reply that you cannot think your way into a life. 23 minCompleted
  4. 4 A life as a work of artLive, love, enjoy: three verbs in place of three nouns. A clay storyteller, a child at a well, a day that is already a good day, and the old and risky idea that the thing to be made well is a life. 27 minCompleted

You’ll be able to

  • Explain the “fourth wall” as an image of the old separation of art from life, name the three marks of the classic aesthetic attitude, and say how Manet, Duchamp, and abstraction each pressed against it.
  • Describe the conditions that make everyday life a field for design (needs that can be met, wishes that cannot) and tell surface aestheticization from the deeper kinds, with a documented example of each.
  • State the critics’ case fairly, from Benjamin and the Frankfurt School to Debord and Fukuyama, beside the defenders’ case, and say which claims are documented and which are disputed.
  • Lay out this course’s own reading of the good life as three verbs, live, love, and enjoy, and the idea of a life as a work of art, with the objections to it.

About this course

This course covers 日常生活审美化 (the aestheticization of everyday life), the question of what happens when beauty and style leave the museum and enter streets, shops, screens, and bodies, and what a good life would look like if it were made the way an artist makes a work. The experiments on labels in Lesson 2 and the forecasting errors in Lesson 4 belong to the same family as the findings in Course 10, Thinking, fast and slow, and the idea of philosophy as a way of life that Lesson 4 meets again in its critics is told at length in Course 25, The philosophical gaze. Here they appear only where the argument needs them.

The argument and the examples lead. Around them we add what is ours: dates, names, and quotations checked against sources (several familiar lines turned out to belong to someone else), background for readers in China and the United States, hands-on activities, and an honest “Another view” in every lesson, so that the critics of aestheticization and its defenders both get a hearing. Where this course offers a reading of its own, such as the three verbs of the last lesson, it says so.