Aesthetics represents an increasingly comprehensive field within the humanities, reflecting the growing aestheticization of society. In the research group Aesthetic Culture, we explore these changes and transgressions that unfold not only between the arts but also between society, art, and culture in the broadest sense.

Our work with aesthetic culture is rooted in a humanistic interdisciplinarity that connects the field of art and cultural theory with foundational discussions of philosophical aesthetics: How can literature and art sharpen our understanding of the weight of the past, the tumult of the present, or, in the words of the Czech author Milan Kundera, "the unbearable lightness of being"? In what ways might the aesthetic perspective contribute to a reinterpretation of the self-created problems of civilization that globalized society seems powerless to address despite our immense knowledge? And what potentials for change are tied to the sensibility that is the cornerstone of aesthetic experience?

We examine the objects of aesthetic culture in the historical, concrete contexts in which they are anchored, but also from a general cultural theoretical perspective. Artworks continually enchant us, irritate us, surprise us, in short, hold our attention to the extent that they make us share general experiences of societal, existential, human character – all that literature, music, visual art, and broadly speaking, aesthetically shaped expressions and objects or situations are capable of.

The field of study thus spans art and its works in the conventional sense, theories about art and forms of knowledge based on sensation, and the aestheticization of society in the form of design, urban spaces, experience economy, media platforms, etc. Central research questions then become how the increasing aestheticization in society shifts the boundaries for art and aesthetic experience, and how this development challenges the core concepts of philosophical aesthetics such as the beautiful and the sublime.

The research group has conducted several joint projects, including publishing two books in Danish, one about aesthetic topologies in literature and art (Spring, 2014) and one about trash and the climate crisis (Spring, 2023). From 2017-2021, the group hosted the DFF-supported international research network Aesthetics Unlimited, whose conferences have left their mark in the form of a special issue on taste in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics (2017), a special issue on beauty in Journal of Somaesthetics (2020), and the anthology Revisiting the Sublime/Revisiter le sublime (Mimesis Edizioni, 2021).

Head of research group: Anne Elisabeth Sejten