CALL FOR PAPERS - ARTOLOGY Vol. 2 No. 1 (2027)

Guest Editor: Prof. Alessandro Bertinetto (University of Turin)

Submission deadline: 31 May 2027 | Publication: December 2027

Overview

Habit has long been the unglamorous term in aesthetics: what we do without attending to it, and therefore what art is supposed to interrupt. Recent work in phenomenology, pragmatism and somaesthetics has made that opposition harder to hold. On these accounts a habit is not a mechanical repetition but a plastic and intelligent disposition — an acquired form of sensitivity that makes perception possible in the first place, and that can be exercised inventively rather than merely re-enacted. Improvisation, on this view, is not the opposite of habit but one of its modes.

This issue of Artology: Studies in the Arts takes up that revised notion and puts it to an intercultural test. Habits are ordinarily invisible to those who have them; they become perceptible when they fail. An intercultural encounter is exactly such a failure: acquired expectations about how a brushstroke should move, how a meal should be shared, how a room should be entered or a guest received, are displaced, and what had seemed like nature reveals itself as formation. Such encounters therefore work as a method — a de-habituation that makes the habit available for description, and a re-habituation through which another one may be acquired.

We are interested in what this method yields when applied between Europe and China. The aim is not to compile a catalogue of contrasts. It is to develop a philosophical vocabulary adequate to how aesthetic habits are formed, transmitted, contested and changed — one that can describe cultural operation without collapsing into stereotype, and without treating either tradition as the norm from which the other deviates.

Suggested topics

We welcome interdisciplinary contributions addressing, but not limited to:

• Second nature. The aesthetic formation of perception; bodily training, discipline and apprenticeship; how acquired dispositions come to feel given.
• Social distinction. Cultural capital and the politics of legitimacy in European and Chinese contexts; who is authorised to judge, and on what grounds.
• Everyday rituals. The normativity of eating together, of hospitality, of domestic space; the aesthetic dimension of ordinary obligation.
• Visual and spatial habits. Chinese calligraphic gesture and European pictorial convention; the organisation of gardens, cities and interiors as trained ways of moving and looking.
• Aesthetic disagreement. Refinement and vulgarity as boundaries a community maintains — and as occasions of learning rather than mere exclusion.
• Digital habits. Algorithmic taste, short-video platforms, and AI-driven aesthetic preference: habit formation at a speed and scale the classical accounts did not anticipate.
• Habit and improvisation. When a disposition becomes inventive; the difference between repeating a practice and continuing it.
• Translation and pedagogy. Teaching an aesthetic tradition to those who lack its habits; what survives the transfer and what does not.

Scope

Contributions are welcome from philosophy, sinology, sociology, art history, performance studies, and adjacent fields. Essays that work closely with particular practices, objects or cases are especially encouraged, as are those that put European and Chinese material in genuine dialogue rather than in parallel.

Submission details

• Deadline: 31 May 2027
• Publication: December 2027
• Language: English
• Length: research articles 6,000–9,000 words; visual essays, critical interventions and shorter contributions 2,000–4,000 words (inclusive of notes)
• Style: Chicago 18 footnotes
• Review: double-blind peer review
• Formats accepted: research articles, visual essays, critical interventions, comparative analyses
• Submission portal: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/artology/about/submissions
• Inquiries: andrea.baldini@pku.edu.cn

The issue also invites contributions for an open section — Research Articles, Visual Essays or Shorter Interventions — for high-quality scholarship on any topic within the journal's scope.

Artology: Studies in the Arts is a diamond open access journal: there are no fees for authors or readers.

Keywords

Aesthetic habits; habitus; intercultural aesthetics; Chinese aesthetics; European aesthetics; second nature; taste; style; gesture; improvisation; everyday aesthetics; aesthetic education.

About the Guest Editor

Alessandro Bertinetto is Professor of Aesthetics in the Department of Philosophy and Educational Sciences at the University of Turin. His work ranges across classical German philosophy, the philosophy of art and the aesthetics of performance, and he is among the philosophers who have done most to bring improvisation into the centre of aesthetic theory. He is the author of Eseguire l'inatteso. Ontologia della musica e improvvisazione and of Aesthetics of Improvisation (Fink, translated from the Italian by Robert T. Valgenti), and a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts. His recent writing on the aesthetic sense of habit stands directly behind the question this issue puts to its contributors.