Aesthetics of Presence

In the field of aesthetic experiences, presence must be seen as mental activities such as attention, curiosity, and participation. The mere physical ‘being-there’ guarantees no aesthetic responses to artistic or natural appearances. When aesthetics became part of the discourse in eighteenth-century Enlightenments philosophy, the beholder was the centre of interest: how observations turned into aesthetic experiences. In this book, the spectator, reader, listener and viewer have again become the focus of scholarly attention, replacing the century-long dominance of the artwork as exclusive object of aesthetics.

In the light of such historical observations, the book develops central aspects of an aesthetics of presence, and introduces, interfoliated with cases of aesthetic experiences in arts and theatre, cities and nature, new parameters of presence. Perceiving, playing, placing and performing are explored and systematised here as theoretical cornerstones of a renewed ‘Aesthetics of Presence’.