Social Aesthetic Goods
Cross (2024) talks about social aesthetic goods, chief examples of which are aesthetic communities and aesthetic traditions.
On aesthetic communities:
Communities in the ordinary sense are groups of individuals who share practices and values, who also identify with the group and its practices, and who recognize each other as members within the group. (Mason, 2000, p. 21) A community is an aesthetic community when the group collaborates within an aesthetic social practice, and when the members of the group share a sense of recognition towards each other as sharing in the practice as a member of the community.
On aesthetic traditions:
Aesthetic communities have histories, and in many cases when one joins such a community one also participates in an aesthetic tradition. Traditions consist of beliefs, customs, teachings, practices, and values that are transmitted over time, from generation to generation; an aesthetic tradition is constituted by the transmission of an aesthetic practice over time.
One question that Cross anticipates concerns whether social aesthetic goods are distinctively aesthetic. In response, Cross says:
I think that the problem with such a view is that the values realized by social aesthetic goods cannot so easily be pulled apart. Consider an analogy with friendship: we value our friendships because of the way that these relationships realize a number of kinds of value: values of pleasure, intimacy, trust, reciprocity, and so on. We can understand and realize these values independently of friendship, but we care about the distinctive way in which they are collectively realized in friendship. This is why it makes sense to talk about the value of friendship, even if its value is derivative of other more basic values that friendship realizes, instantiates, or facilitates. Similarly, in discussing social aesthetic goods, I aim to indicate a class of goods in which what we might think of as “aesthetic” values and “social” values interpenetrate, such that these goods offer a distinctive mode of realizing both. We don’t care separately about e.g. the “community” part of Sacred Harp singing and the “singing” part. What we value instead is the way that these are unified—the way that they are jointly realized while interacting with each other and mutually reinforcing each other.
I would be interested in digging deeper into the inseparability of the social and the aesthetic. I feel this way about social identities, but I also do not know exactly how to articulate the inseparability thesis. In any case, this paper provides some food for thought.
Here is the full abstract:
The aesthetic domain is a social one. We coordinate our individual acts of creation, appreciation, and performance with those of others in the context of social aesthetic practices. More strongly, many of the richest goods of our aesthetic lives are constitutively social; their value lies in the fact that individuals are engaged in joint aesthetic agency, participating in cooperative and collaborative project that outstrips what can be realized alone. I provide an account of nature and value of two such social aesthetic goods—aesthetic communities and aesthetic traditions—and further argue that such goods are a core constituent of an aesthetically good life. At the same time, I argue that the ideals of the dominant theory of aesthetic value, aesthetic value hedonism, are incompatible with a full commitment to these social aesthetic goods; the hedonist is thereby alienated from the other participants within aesthetic communities and traditions. This sets up a dilemma for the hedonist: either the hedonist must bite the bullet, accepting that the theory leads to a problematic form of aesthetic alienation; or, we must reject aesthetic value hedonism and adopt a different theory of aesthetic value which accommodates the value of social aesthetic goods. I argue that we should take the second horn of the dilemma.