Defining art and aesthetics (interview question)
My friend and colleague Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
Before proceeding we ought to address some definitional questions in relation to ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’. How should we understand these complex and contested terms?
I use those terms in a deliberately expansive way. Art is not confined to galleries or professional practice. It refers to the broader human capacity to create, to shape, to give form to experience. It includes music and painting, of course, but also craft, storytelling, ritual, the design of our homes, the cultivation of gardens, and even the way we live our lives. In this sense, everyone is always and already an artist, consciously or not. At first instance that might sound trite or counterintuitive, but on reflection the paradox resolves into a profound truth.
William Morris, the British political and aesthetic theorist, had a decisive influence on how I came to understand art – so much so that my definition is, in many respects, a contemporary extension of his insights. Morris rejected the narrow, institutional understanding of art as something produced by a gifted minority and consumed by everyone else. Instead, he proposed a radically democratic and integrated conception. His famous formulation – that art is ‘the expression of man’s pleasure in labour’ – became a touchstone for my own thinking.
What struck me most about Morris is that he dissolved the boundary between art and everyday life. For him, art was not confined to paintings in galleries or symphonies in concert halls. It was present wherever human beings engaged in meaningful, skilled, and freely undertaken activity that gave form to things that were both useful and beautiful. A well-made chair, a woven textile, a carefully tended garden – these were no less artistic than a poem or a painting, provided they embodied care, creativity, and a certain joy in making.
This insight allowed me to rethink art in civilisational terms. Industrial capitalism had, in Morris’s view, degraded both labour and art simultaneously. Work became alienated – performed under compulsion, stripped of meaning – and art became specialised, commodified, unaffordable for most people, and increasingly detached from ordinary life. The result was a society in which most people neither experienced their labour as meaningful nor their culture as participatory.
I take this critique very seriously. In my aesthetic writings I adopt a similarly broad definition of art – as the meaningful and pleasurable expression of creative labour. This allows me to argue that art is not a luxury reserved for affluent societies but a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. It also aligns with my ecological concerns, because many forms of low-impact, sufficiency-based living – gardening, repairing, cooking, crafting, building – can become aesthetic practices when approached in the right spirit.
Morris also helped me see that aesthetics is inherently political. If art is integrated into everyday life, then the organisation of labour, production, and social relations becomes an aesthetic issue. A society that produces ugly work, ugly environments, and disposable commodities is not just economically flawed; it is aesthetically impoverished. Conversely, a society that cultivates beauty in ordinary practices of production and consumption – what Morris called a ‘democracy of art’ – would be one in which people participate creatively in shaping their world.
In that sense, Morris helped me move from an understanding of art as an object to an understanding of art as a process, even art as a way of being. This perspective becomes increasingly important in an age of artificial intelligence, where ‘art objects’, as such, can often be produced today by computers with merely a well-crafted ‘prompt’. In order to save art from technological annihilation, it must be reconceived as a lived process and experience, not a product.
In this light, art becomes less about what we produce and more about how we live – how we relate to our work, to each other, and to the material world. So Morris’s influence is both conceptual and political. He gave me a definition of art expansive enough to include everyday life, and a vision of an aesthetic society in which that definition could be realised. My own work tries to extend that vision into an age of ecological limits and energy descent, suggesting that a civilisation of sufficiency might need to be a civilisation of art – not in spite of material and energetic limits, but because of those limits.
As for the term ‘aesthetics’ – likewise, this does not simply refer to the philosophy of beauty. It concerns perception, sensibility, and the way we encounter the world. It asks how things appear to us, how they move us, how they are felt and valued. And because perception shapes action, aesthetics becomes of social and political import. A civilisation that perceives the Earth as a resource will behave very differently from one that perceives it as something worthy of reverence and care.
