Everyday Aesthetics by Yuriko Saito: A Note This summer I finished Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics. Saito, a Japanese-born philosopher who taught for decades at the Rhode Island School of Design, set out to recover the aesthetic dimension of ordinary life (the choices we make about our surroundings, our food, our homes) that modern Western aesthetics had largely neglected. Living in the United States for ten years, I understand the impulse behind the book. American visual culture often...

Surfaces: Where Society Skims, Art Reveals, and Heaven Meets Earth. Philosophers have long noted that the surface (where a society skims its essence) is a place of borders, appearances, and quick judgments. Yet it is also where art happens. Art, that ultimate surface, reveals the inner state of society. Yet it also reflects, complicates, and sometimes transcends it. Édouard Manet’s use of mirrors in paintings like A Bar at the Folies-Bergère marked a striking turn: the surface no longer just...

Brooklyn, NY, 440 Gallery, July 2-31: "Harmony and Chaos", juried by Hayley Ferber. Providence RI, Providence Art Club, Jun 21-Jul 16: National Juried show, juried by Leah Triplett. Boston, MA, Bromfield Gallery, June 3-27: member exhibition. Cohasset, MA, SSCA Festival, Cohasset Commons June 19-2, juried by Christina Godfrey, Sunne Savage and Elizabeth Sullivan. Cambridge, MA, Canal Street Gallery, until June 7: "Listening to our planet", juried by Adriana Prat.