Joint Aesthetic Judgments

The Joint Aesthetic Judgments research project is based on the observation that personal perception and expressiveness are at the heart of art education in schools, while collaborative engagement receives little attention. Especially when it comes to judgement, the individual perspective seems to be the only option.
Considering that judgement is a communicative act directed towards and oriented 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 judgement back to traditional Western ideas that continue the ideal of a reason-centred Enlightenment. It examines the school as a place where community is central on the one hand, but on the other hand, essential interpersonal practices such as judgement have an individualising effect, thereby separating students from one another. 

In order to confront this paradox of a place of community that suppresses communality in favour of performance-oriented individualisation, the project explores existing practices in standard teaching, questions the implicit theories and, in collaboration with pupils, develops new ways in which people can experience aesthetic artefacts and situations together and come to meaningful judgements about them. In doing so, it develops a concept of community that is not based on uniformity, but on the joint action of heterogeneous actors.

Torsten Meyer (Universität Köln)
Gabriele Weiß (Universität Siegen)
Patrique deGraft Yankson (University of Education, Winneba)
Nicole Brown (University College London)
Ernst Wagner (Exploring Visual Cultures network (EVC))