Madalina Diaconu

Any attempt to outline a meteorological aesthetics centered on so-called beautiful weather has to overcome several difficulties: In everyday life, the appreciation of the weather is mostly related to practical interests or reduced to the ideal of stereotypical fine weather that is conceived according to blue-sky thinking irrespective of climate diversity. Also, an aesthetics of fine weather seems, strictly speaking, to be impossible given that such weather conditions usually allow humans to focus on aspects other than weather, which contradicts the autotelic character of beauty. The unreflective equation of beautiful weather with moderately sunny weather and a cloudless sky also collides with the psychological need for variation: even living in a “paradisal” climate would be condemned to end in monotony. Finally, whereas fine weather is related in modern realistic literature to cosmic harmony and a universal natural order, contemporary literary examples show that in the age of the climate change, fine weather may be deceitful and its passive contemplation, irresponsible. This implies the necessity of a reflective aesthetic attitude on weather, as influenced by art, literature, and science, which discovers the poetics of bad weather and the wonder that underlies average weather conditions.

Die Ikonen der Ostkirche werden theologisch als „Sinnbilder im realistischen Sinne des Wortes“ gedeutet. Damit verbunden ist ein sog. sakramentaler Realismus, demgemäß das Urbild im materiellen Bild real präsent und wirksam ist. Vor der Erfindung der Fotografie spielte die mimetische Wirklichkeitsnähe bei der Heiligendarstellung kaum eine Rolle; von den ‚jüngsten‘ Heiligen gibt es aber sowohl Fotografien als auch traditionell gemalte Bilder. Der Status dieser Fotos und ihr Einfluss auf die Ikonen wurde bisher weder in der Bildwissenschaft noch in der Theologie hinterfragt. Die Relevanz solcher Fotos für den Glauben wird zu einer virulenten Frage in der Ostkirche, wo das Gebot der Bilderverehrung gilt und bereits ‚Fotoikonen‘ von Heiligen kommerzialisiert werden. Als Grundlage für den Vergleich zwischen Fotos und Ikonen dient Roland Barthes’ realistische Auffassung der Fotografie in seinem Essay Die helle Kammer, der explizite Analogien zwischen Fotos und byzantinischen Ikonen enthält. „Wohl könnte ich ein Bild, ein Gemälde, eine Statue verehren, doch auch ein Photo?“, fragt Barthes dort. Im Weiteren wird versucht, diese Frage durch eine Gegenüberstellung von Fotografien und Ikonen in Bezug auf ihre Referentialität, Narrativität, Lichtsymbolik bzw. „Emanation des Referenten“, Autopoiesis, Reproduktion und Spektralität zu beantworten.

Constantin Noica is widely believed to be one of the most original and prominent Romanian thinker of the last fifty years. In 1998, a year after his death, his book De dignitete Europae appeared in German translation. In it Noica tackles the classical philosophy of culture as morphology in Frobensius and Spengler, suggesting an interpretation of European historical cultural epochs from the viewpoint of linguistic-morphological forms: the Middle Ages correspond to the noun, the Renaissance to the adjective, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Classicism to the adverb, followed by the Pronoun, and the present age to numerals and conjunctions. To what extent can we today, twenty years later, at the time when Romania is entering the European Union, still advocate such philosophical Eurocentrism?

‘Eine weite Wohnung unter freiem Himmel’? On the Aesthetics of Gardens of the Senses Although the common experience of nature and gardens engages all the senses, historical analysis of garden theory shows a clear tendency to reduce green spaces to their imagery and to take the visual arts as the model for garden design. A counter-tendency to this primacy of vision has, however, lately emerged -- namely, gardens of the senses or healing gardens, which accentuate also the tactile and olfactory qualities of vegetation and materials. The literature on gardens of the senses provides useful empirical guidelines for garden designers, but on a rather eclectic theoretical basis that applies mainly to private jardins de plaisir. Nevertheless, the accentuation of tactile and olfactory qualities in gardens constitutes a source of well-being, and contributes to a deceleration of life, a positive experience of the natural order and rhythm, and the habitability of a place. Moreover, they are informal laboratories for the education of the senses, and their empirical taxonomies may be integrated into an aesthetic theory of sensory design.

Arnold Berleant’s enlargement of the scope of aesthetics to environments and social relationships opens the way for associations with approaches from other human and social sciences. One possible term of comparison is Hartmut Rosa’s theory of modernity, which applies the concept of resonance to various fields, including nature and art. At the beginning, their aims appear to be different and their alternatives slightly different: engagement stresses the continuity between the embodied self and the world, whereas resonance is primarily based upon a model of communication. Nevertheless, their relational theories converge in several respects: they focus on experience, defend participatory models against objectifying and merely contemplative relationships, and practise social criticism in their search for a meaningful and good life.

Collecting goes beyond art collecting and seems to meet a more general need. Although it originally aided survival and has predecessors in the animal world, the gesture of collecting has complex motivations. After exploring the collector’s psychology and the behavioural differences between collectors and spectators, this paper analyses the logic of collecting and its principles: order, variation, attractive and meaningful display, the control of contingency, processuality and growth, seriality, and limitation. Finally, the paradoxical attempt to collect non-collectibles, such as gods, clouds or human relations will be shown to illustrate a para-aesthetics of collecting which ranges from the poetics of everyday life to aestheticism.