Nicole Hall

This paper is a case study of Olafur Eliasson’s Paris installation of Ice Watch (2014-2018) that coincided with the Climate Change COP-21 conference at the United Nations in 2015, and whose message was poignantly felt as a reminder of global warming, the melting polar regions, and the current environmental crisis. In particular, I explore how and what might we learn from this installation, to consider and rethink the relationship between aesthetic value, ethical value, and the concept of sustainability. Considering that Eliasson’s work requires relational perceptual-intellectual double awareness, it is argued that virtuous appreciation, judgment, and evaluation emerge if engaged for the right kinds of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic reasons, even if one is left in deep sadness or discomfort regarding the work’s creation. Having responded to objections such as artistic instrumentalism, Ice Watch is vindicated by combining perceptual, multi-sensual experience, and beauty with tragedy, grief, and guilt—emotions derived from intellectual, contextual, and epistemic concerns and also ethical worries, including those that arise from the artist’s actions. I conclude that qualitative, aesthetic experience provides access to understanding nature’s fragility and our own fragility, when accompanied by the right kinds of internally motivated reasons, even in some instances of controversial artworks.

How should we characterize the interaction between moral and aesthetic values in the context of environmental aesthetics? This question is important given the urgency of many environmental problems and the particular role played by aesthetic value in our experience of environment. To address this question, we develop a model of Environmental Virtue Aesthetics (EVA) that, we argue, offers a promising alternative to current theories in environmental aesthetics with respect to the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. EVA counters environmental aesthetic theories that focus more narrowly on scientific knowledge and ground aesthetic value in ways that obfuscate pluralistic modes of appreciation of and relationships with natural and semi-natural environments. To develop EVA, we work with a revised notion of respect and engage with ideas concerning the development of aesthetic sensibilities, care, and virtuous aesthetic appreciation. EVA has the potential to support forms of human-nature co-flourishing, as well as constituting an aesthetic grounding for ecological citizenship.