Everyday Aesthetics: Institutionalization and "Normative Turn"

In 2015, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy published for the first time online the entry “Aesthetics of Everyday Life”, authored by Yuriko Saito. This contribution is emblematical of the institutionalization process that Everyday Aesthetics has recently undergone, and that seems to have released it from its ancillary role, by officially recognizing its “academic dignity”. But there is also a critical trend that has been developed in recent years in the field of the aesthetics of everyday life and that stresses two main aspects that greatly contribute to the understanding of Everyday Aesthetics: the will to systematize its methodological approaches through a recognizable nomenclature, and the necessity for a “normative-intersubjective turn” that would avoid the risk of trivializing the aesthetic. Aim of this paper is to address the relevance of such critical trend, in terms of the way in which Everyday Aesthetics is finally undergoing a process of “maturation” after a first stage of acquisition of a critical awareness, as testified to by the first surveys produced in this field (that will be shortly analysed in the first paragraph of this paper). Therefore the core question that this contribution aims to answer is the following: can Everyday Aes- thetics be fully recognized as a growing sub-discipline, or is it rather a more general issue, or topic of philosophical discussion?