Hospitality of Aesthetics

Cultural exchanges, family life, and community engagement, both local and global in nature, are all sites wherein the ethic of hospitality is active, yet, the complexities of hospitality are not commonly understood in these venues of socialization. Therefore, I have approached this work with the intention of it serving as a primer on the ethic of hospitality; the first two chapters are particularly important in that regard, as they explicate the lexicon and practices of hospitality historically. The challenge for a contemporary ethic of hospitality is to move through the fearful notions motivating hospitality historically toward more conscious and realistic affirmative relations among humans and between humans and other sentient beings. In Chapter 3, I argue that the need for the present configuration of hospitality might be eliminated upon the dismantling of patriarchy and through a contemporary orientation to the concepts of peace and love. I explore alternatives to the dichotomy of self/other that encompass mutual rights, responsibilities, and opportunities vis-à-vis ontology and space. With this in mind, in Chapter 4, I consider what gifts a philosophy of physical geography has to offer the ethic of hospitality. No doubt the geography of home informs our psyches in foundational ways. How does art similarly mediate the liminal grounds of these external and internal territories? I begin Chapter 5 with a discussion of art that utilizes hospitality as an organizing feature. I then posit the ways in which art made from natural materials is uniquely orientated toward the ethic of hospitality and advance the notion that works of art that exemplify this connection can bring us to more nuanced articulations of hospitality and further, that art generally is hospitality embodied