Nothing made nature, yet we find it beautiful.But is it nature we admire – or its pictures?
Aesthetic Problems of Modern Mediation, Representation and Falsity of Nature
Estetski problemi sodobnega posredovanja, upodabljanja in ponarejenosti narave
An English translation of the original Slovenian doctoral dissertation (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, 2018).
The finding in brief
Since its revival around 1960, the aesthetics of nature has mostly appreciated not nature itself but its pictures: photographs, broadcasts and, lately, images on the web and social networks. Even the Earth seen from space reaches us as depictions modelled on landscape painting, while the limits of the human body in real environments have been overlooked.
The dissertation therefore proposes a deep aesthetics of nature, one that refrains from mediating, depicting and falsifying nature.
Like many people, I have always loved nature. In it I found a certain calm, a presence, a real sense of contact. Out of this grew a question I wanted to answer for myself: why is nature beautiful? Art can be beautiful because someone made it; nature has no maker, and yet it is beautiful too. This dissertation is about that question.
I wrote it between 2012 and 2018, with many of its thoughts shaped on long walks with my dog. Six years of writing a doctoral dissertation is an immense effort – physical and emotional; it takes the whole person. It stands here as a sign that someone once thought this through, before algorithms and artificial minds have ground it over half a million times.
Such effort is no longer much valued now that we have artificial intelligence. That is why I am giving it this place – not as a monument, but simply as something that is there.
Translated from the Slovenian with the help of AI; quotations that could not be verified are paraphrased, with their sources kept. How quotations are handled