The tattoo has long been overlooked as an object of serious aesthetic inquiry. However, recent developments in aesthetic theory challenge traditional, object-centered models of analysis by foregrounding the importance of process and embodiment. Building on this shift, this paper argues that tattoos possess distinctive aesthetic value by virtue of their processual and embodied nature. By situating tattoos within this broader reconceptualization of aesthetic value, this paper shows why tattoos war…
Read moreThe tattoo has long been overlooked as an object of serious aesthetic inquiry. However, recent developments in aesthetic theory challenge traditional, object-centered models of analysis by foregrounding the importance of process and embodiment. Building on this shift, this paper argues that tattoos possess distinctive aesthetic value by virtue of their processual and embodied nature. By situating tattoos within this broader reconceptualization of aesthetic value, this paper shows why tattoos warrant sustained philosophical attention. The tattoo collapses the traditional dualisms that structure much of established aesthetic theory: object/viewer, viewer/artist, and artist/object. Drawing upon John Dewey’s Art as Experience, Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics, and Marilynn Johnson’s Adorning Bodies: Meaning, Evolution, and Beauty in Humans and Animals, I argue that a tattoo is best understood not as a static image, but as a temporally extended aesthetic event, coming about by process and through embodiment. The aesthetic evaluation of a tattoo should not be directed solely at the image inscribed upon skin, but rather at the quality of experience through which it comes into being and continues to be lived.
