PR 554: Virtue Aesthetics & Sustainability

Article Data

URL/PhilPapers Link:

Authors

N. Hall

Abstract

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.

Video Review

Reviewer Reports

nogre0:

Rating: 85

vipersgratitude:

Rating: 25

Tyndereos:

Rating: 33

Annfernal:

Rating: 67

DCIBanks:

Rating: 100

k_pars:

Rating: 81

tenderjuicynuggets:

Rating: 83