Clouded judgments? Aesthetics, morality and everyday life in early 21st century culture

Abstract

This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these ‘orders of worth’ interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum of evaluations from beautiful to ugly – and morality – evaluations about good and evil, right and wrong – have a strong presence. The contributions zoom in on everyday cultural consumption, where people create, seek out and discuss ‘good’ food, clothing, films and architecture, and professional situations where people look for ‘good’ jobs, want to work in ‘good’ work spaces and aim to be a ‘good’ worker. Integrating insights from cultural studies, sociology, valuation studies and science and technology studies, this special issue shows, first, how judgments of aesthetic and moral value are central to the fabric of social life – from the smallest level of everyday interactions to the large scale of economic relations and power im/balances. Second, these valuations often clash, blend and blur. This blurring and blending enables the drawing of social boundaries, the consolidation of identities and the shaping of selves. But it also allows for seduction, manipulation and obfuscation of power dynamics. Third, the contributions show that in contemporary post-Fordist, meritocratic consumer societies, beauty and morality are increasingly entangled with economic and political logics, leading to new social struggles and new forms of alienation and exploitation.