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How Beautiful is Small? Music, Globalization and the Aesthetics of the Local

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Veit Erlmann
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Extract

Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of the aesthetic community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste. Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, marked by the Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, they emerge out of the “hope,” as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgement, for unanimity. But because, on the other hand, the basis for such communities lies in subjective tastes and in divergent notions of what is beautiful, aesthetic communities can never reach a status of stability and permanence. Aesthetic communities, then, for Kant are more an idea, a promise, than they are a concrete reality. What keeps aesthetic communities alive is that this promise is never fulfilled. Like clouds, they must disappear the moment they take shape.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 30 , 1998 , pp. 12 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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