Estetica, popular music e sottoculture (sezione monografica di "Scenari. Rivista di estetica e metafisica", vol. 21)

The history of the relation between Popular Culture and the philosophical discipline of Aesthetics has often been a history of one-sided mistrust and suspicion. For various reasons and via different means (be they ideological, social, rhetorical, etc.), the popular dimension of human culture has been kept away from serious philosophical attention, especially in the modern age: namely, in the age in which the discipline of Aesthetics was officially “baptized”. In fact, tightly knotted with its popular roots and destination, Popular Culture has often been accused to exhibit various features (appearances, superficiality, distraction, standardization, ephemerality, etc.) that are suspected to steer away one’s attention from supposedly more serious, real, true or important things. Aesthetics, since its foundation as a specific branch of Philosophy, has often aimed to define the necessary conditions and the exact characteristics of dimensions such as beauty, judgments of taste, aesthetic experience, and especially art (i.e., what is worthy to be included in the special category of “true” works of art and what is not). From this point of view, Aesthetics has often provided classifications of the various arts, in which popular forms of art have been frequently devalued and defined as “low”, in comparison to a narrow group of arts that have been typically evaluated as “high”. However, from the early 20th century until today – and especially after the advent and the expansion of the various poetics of Pop in visual arts, literature, music, architecture, design, and other fields – the dividing walls of the “Artworld” have often crumbled, the museums’ doors have often been open to include works that once would have never been accepted, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between “high” and “low” products has often been filled. Among other things, this has partially contributed to establish a more favorable attitude in the field of Aesthetics towards philosophical reflections on Popular Culture. Among the various forms of Popular Culture, Popular Music has been especially devalued in the context of contemporary Aesthetics. However, beside these critiques – quite often connected to a precise, specific and narrow idea of Art as always and necessarily esoteric –, in the last decades Popular Culture, in general, and Popular Music, in particular, have sometimes been the object of significant defenses and rehabilitations. Our volume on the topic “Aesthetics, Popular Music, and Subcultures” (vol. 21, n. 2/2024 of the journal “Scenari”) includes contributions by scholars from different disciplines and with different backgrounds dealing with contemporary Aesthetics and Musicology, with a focus on Popular Music and especially on its Subcultural genres, styles, and forms.