Joint Aesthetic Judgments

A one-sided focus on the individual in art education in schools and educational theory can lower the chance of communal learning processes. The research project is based on the observation that personal perception and expressiveness are at the heart of art lessons at school, while little attention is paid to collective engagement. Especially when it comes to judgment, the individual perspective seems to be without alternative. If we consider that judging is a communicative act that is directed towards others, the strong focus on the individual is particularly striking. Joint Aesthetic Judgments questions this focus by tracing the theoretical and practical approaches to aesthetic judgment back to traditional Western ideas that continue the ideal of a reason-centered enlightenment. It examines the school as a place where community is central, but where even such essential interpersonal practices as judgment are individualized and students are thus separated from one another. To confront this paradox of a place of community that represses communality in favor of output-oriented individualization, the project explores existing practices in standard teaching, questions the implicit theories and develops new ways in which people can experience aesthetic artifacts and situations together and come to meaningful judgments about them in a participatory way with students. In this process, an idea of community is developed that is not aimed at uniformity, but at the joint action of heterogeneous actors.