‘The frame', the ‘rhythm’, and the 'imaginary’: Rethinking the Cosmopolitan Aesthetic Experience.

The chapter aims to offer a theoretical-empirical contribution, from a sociological perspective, towards rethinking the aesthetic experience through the identification of its constitutive elements − the frame, the rhythm, and the imaginary − showing how each of these elements can generate relations of cosmopolitan openness. In the first section, the reflection concerns the bad reputation affecting the aesthetic face of cosmopolitanism, mistakenly understood, in its essence, as its ‘superficial face’, as opposed to its ‘good face’, represented by moral cosmopolitanism. I analyse how this dichotomous vision derives from two sociological discourses on aesthetics – Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, and the postmodern perspective. In the second section, I address the need to rethink the aesthetic experience ‘in its own right’ from the perspective of two classical sociologists – Georg Simmel and Émile Durkheim. The three components of an aesthetic experience are identified and discussed in relation to their respective contributions. After considering the methodology used, in the final section I apply the theoretical grid based on the reflections of Simmel and Durkheim to the analysis of a concrete case: the 2015 Festival of Europe (Festival d’Europa), in Florence.