Boško Drobnjak and Miško Šuvaković, “Editorial: 21st ICA Meets Popular Inquiry”
The Organization of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) under the auspices of International Association for Aesthetics on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”, had the basic intention to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our planet.
This special issue of Popular Inquiry consists of six of the papers presented at the ICA 21st Congress that are thematically within the scope of the journal. Dušan Milenković’s text “Understated Significance of Form in Gracyk's Aesthetics of Popular Music” discusses the significance of form which causes specific problems in Theodore Gracyk’s aesthetic theory. Fuminori Akiba’s “Aesthetics of Japanese Convenience Stores: From the Point of 'Eating Alone'” reconsiders the lack of shadow/darkness and food culture from convenience stores in contemporary Japan. Maxim Demchuk’s article on “Deconstruction of Melody and Rhythm as Aesthetic Elements of Contemporary Popular Music (The Case of Kanye West’s Album «Yeezus»)” emphasizes the phenomenon of the consumption of contemporary musical products available for listening on the various social networks. Aleš Čakalič’s article “Tragedy and Farce in Dušan Kovačević’s Post-Yugoslav Screenplays” interprets how specific Serbian film scripts can be read in relation to Marx’s assertion. Yumi Kim Takenaka’s paper on “The Family of Man in Japan: A Photographic Exhibition for World Peace and Atomic Culture in the 1950s” stress the ethical dimension of the exhibition The Family of Man, a large-scale photographic record of the human development and cycles of life in the context of contemporary global antagonisms.
Texts collected in this issue discuss complex relations between political, philosophical, cultural, aesthetic modalities of contemporary art and culture.
