Aesthetics and Connection

Abstract

Some fifteen years ago, Hans Hansen and I offered four ways that aesthetics was conceptualized within the field of organizational aesthetics, as epistemology, connection, criteria for judgements, and categories (Taylor & Hansen, 2005). In the decade and half since then, I have become more and more interested in the idea of aesthetics as connection, even as it also seems to me that the field has explored that idea the least of the four conceptions. During that same time, a variety of voices have started to speak of a lack of connection as the underlying crisis of all the rest of the crises of our time (e.g. Monbiot, 2017).