Aesthetic Expertise: An Exploration and Defense [Hardcover]

In this first ever book-length study of aesthetic expertise, Ole Martin Skille?s outlines the nature and purpose of aesthetic expertise, with particular emphasis on the direction of attention, and examines how aesthetic expertise manifests across diverse roles within aesthetic practices. He discusses the foundations of aesthetic trust via the concept of calibration, thereby developing an outline of social aesthetics using the concept of embedded expertise.

Skille?s distinguishes between practitionersthose who create and perform aesthetically engaging worksand advisors, who educate, enlighten, and make recommendations. Considering the latter roles,Aesthetic Expertise: An Exploration and Defenseargues that aesthetics ought to move away from a paradigm centered on critics and reviewers and the idea of a standard of taste, and over to an approach anchored in instruction and the triangulation between instructor, artwork, and learner. This educational interaction is pivotal since not only does it foster a shared language but it tightly links critical reasoning with aesthetic appreciation, guided by perceptual guidance and training. In doing so, it clarifies how meaningful consensus and dissent in aesthetic discourse are possible, underpinning our discussions and critiques of artistic works and their interpretations.

In Aesthetic Expertise, Ole Martin Skille?s explains what aesthetic expertise is, what it's used for, how it manifests across diverse roles within aesthetic practices, and why we should want access to it to live our aesthetic lives to the full.Ole Martin Skille?sis professor of philosophy at The University of Bergen.

In this timely, concise and cogently argued book, Ole Martin Skille?s shows how the devaluation of aesthetic expertise results in a significant reduction in the richness and value of our aesthetic and artistic lives. With a judicious combination of empirical and philosophical methods, and drawing widely on Kant andl“&