ABSTRACT
Any cursory glance at the existing literature on what has been referred to as aesthetic cosmopolitanism, which is relatively scarce when compared with the proliferation of works on other aspects of contemporary cosmopolitanism, reveals that, as Nikos Papastergiadis points out, ‘since the Stoics the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of cosmopolitanism have been slowly disregarded’ (Papastergiadis 2012: 82). In addition, one can soon perceive significant misunderstandings or confusions in current notions of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Three of the most salient of these are identified in what follows. First, I would like to refer to the ambiguity of the term itself and rather favour, for my purposes, a narrower concept of artistic cosmopolitanism. The notion of aesthetic cosmopolitanism is useful to call attention to the predominantly moral and political emphasis of current concepts of cosmopolitanism, as Papastergiadis suggests. However, aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not just limited to art. It includes a whole range of experiences, from the awe-inspiring admiration provoked by a sublime landscape in the Alps to the ugliness associated with certain urban or industrial settings. The problem lies, according to Theodor Adorno (1997), in reducing this much wider notion of the aesthetic to the artistic. This is why he defends the fundamental difference between natural beauty and the artificiality of art, even if they have increasingly become confused in the philosophical tradition since Hegel. In this respect, artistic cosmopolitanism appears as a more accurate term to refer to the world-opening projects and experiences that are specifically the product of an artistic or literary endeavour. Moreover, the notion of artistic cosmopolitanism also allows us to distinguish between the forms of high and low culture, a distinction that is obliterated in more general conceptions of cultural cosmopolitanism. This distinction is highly relevant whereas mass culture can easily lead to banal cosmopolitanism, in Beck’s terms, a trivial, unconscious and deformed cosmopolitanism based on what is (Beck 2006: 19), artistic cosmopolitanism can teach us what radical openness to, and engagement with, the other means, and open up imaginary spaces for living
with difference. This is the reason why the latter is significant not only as an expression of relevant developments in the cultural sphere, but should also be recovered for, and referred to, more general notions of critical or reflexive cosmopolitanism (Mignolo 2000; Delanty 2009, 2014; Mendieta 2009).
