Wittgenstein and Hegel on Art and the Everyday

This chapter explores the intersection of art and the everyday through the philosophical lenses of Wittgenstein and Hegel. Wittgenstein’s concept of viewing life ‘from outside’ correlates with an ‘antitheatrical’ (Michael Fried) artistic stance that reveals the aesthetic value of the ‘everyday’, exemplified in Jeff Wall’s masterpiece Morning Cleaning (1999). The chapter delves deeper into this perspective by linking it with William Wordsworth’s ideas on the creative imagination’s role in reshaping everyday experiences. Additionally, it discusses Hegel’s analysis of seventeenth-century Dutch painting to illustrate how these artists aesthetically transformed the everyday. However, Hegel’s insights also hint at a potential issue: the dependence of this transformation on a pre-existing framework of value, such as religion, which raises questions about art’s ability to genuinely transmute the everyday or if it merely superimposes meaning onto it. This examination highlights the complexities of interpreting the everyday through art without a traditional value system.