Terra sebv s acta mvsei sabesiensi s

T. M. Stepanskaya 

 

202

contemporary society. The lack of a single system of values and meanings is 

a typical feature of such crisis. Art, brought into world on the basis of 

traditions, is a source of spiritual values; high art strengthens personal 

creative qualities and broadens the cultural potential of the bearers of 

everyday consciousness. 

Everyday consciousness is understood as the combination of ideas, 

knowledge, orientations and stereotypes based on direct everyday human 

experience; it dominates the social community to which people belong. 

Everyday consciousness differs from the kind of awareness based on 

scientific knowledge, obtained by means of objective research, which 

provides insight into essential links which characterise nature and society. 

The kind of mistakes that can prevent scientific cognition of the world and 

promote the preservation of ingrained prejudices are common to everyday 

consciousness. On the other hand, the recollection of oft-repeated links 

observed between things and people (folk wisdom) typical of everyday 

consciousness provides opportunities to draw correct conclusions which are 

verified by the practical realities of everyday life.

1

  

The notion of everyday consciousness is closely connected with the 

notion of “everyday life” which is a popular trope in the humanities at 

present. It is interpreted widely and variously. The modern situations and 

contexts in which terms such as “everyday life,” “everyday 

consciousness/cognition” and “common sense” are used have their own 

explicit historical-cultural specificity. The philosophical problems of 

everyday life stem from the fact that the evaluation of its three constituent 

components - everyday reality, everyday consciousness (knowledge) and the 

philosophy of common sense - do not coincide. From a cognitive-

sociological point of view, everyday life represents a social use of the results 

of cultural creative work. Individual creative achievements (innovative 

technologies, pieces of art, philosophical and religious ideas, etc.) owe their 

origin to their specific authors and, acting as signifiers of a gap in cultural 

succession, receive their inter-subjective form in the processes of social use, 

laying the foundations for new traditional mechanisms.  

In the methodological plan of this study, everyday life represents the 

result of an analytical procedure in which a synchronous cut of cultural 

migration is carried out. Everyday life can be seen as a static image of the 

world, where creative, innovative processes are artificially paused; only the 

stable, unquestionable bases of human life and activities are distinguished 

(traditions, rituals, stereotypes, categorisation systems). Everyday life makes 

the phenomena by which it is characterised sacral, imbuing them with the 

status of everyday myths. Examples of everyday life are also determined by 

                                                 

1

 Kondratiev 2006, p. 138. 

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Conceptual Art Exhibitions as a Dialogue between Art and Its Contemporaries 

 

203

the sphere of human society to which they belong. Everyday life as a reality 

is based on the relative permanence of social conditions. As a kind of 

consciousness, it consists of effective governance by collectively-held socio-

psychological structures (archetypes). As a form of cognition, everyday life 

is expressed through the processes of cognitive socialisation, adaptation to 

new conditions and adoption of archetypes. However, in all its hypostasis, 

every day life does not, as a rule, correspond to any autonomous sphere; 

there is no substance to the everyday. Its hypostases are insufficient and do 

not exist outside the other manifestations of human existence and reality. 

To characterise everyday life, it is important to distinguish two types 

of social situations - everyday and beyond everyday - equally typical of 

human consciousness and existence. Everyday life is a notional problem 

connected with a number of fundamental pair oppositions. Aberration and 

truth, existence and potential, secular and sacral are analogous pairs the 

terminological difference between which is determined by the difference of 

subject areas. These opposing poles of cognitive process, moral 

consciousness and religiosity form two dimensions in culture which can be 

denoted as everyday and myth. The entirety of human life can be seen in 

their interaction and tense standoff; its content is determined by 

approaching and moving away from these poles, in varying orientation 

towards one or another direction. Everyday life, in order to find 

significance, requires reference to sources and prototypes; it requires the 

creation of myth and mythic substantiation. Philosophy and the humanities 

always take everyday life in its various forms as their object of investigation, 

constantly teetering between bringing it down to the level of routine 

consciousness and practice or exalting it to the myth-like horizon peculiar 

to modernity.

2

  

The problem of the correlation between everyday consciousness and 

art is connected with the problem of the connection between art and 

worldview. Different aspects of this problem are presented in works of 

aestheticians (M. Kagan, S. Rapport, E. Volodin and I. Nikitina

3

), while B. 

Vysheslavtsev writes about how professional art belongs to the non-

everyday level of artistic consciousness.

4

 In his opinion, the rise from 

subconscious impulses to the supreme values of the human spirit can be 

explained by the human ability for imagination:  

“The subconscious mind is that underground source from which fantasy 

sprouts and, at the same time, the dark pool upon which sparkling images 

                                                 

2

 http://enc-dic.com/enc_epist/Povsednevnost-517.html, accessed 25 June 2014. 

3

 Nikitina 2003; Nikitina 2004. 

4

 Vysheslavtsev 1994. 

www.cclbsebes.ro/muzeul-municipal-ioan-raica.html   /   www.cimec.ro

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