A new issue of Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics has just been published and is freely available on the journal’s website, estetikajournal.org.
The journal is published twice a year by Helsinki University Press in cooperation with the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague. It operates with a triple-anonymized peer-review process and follows the Diamond Open Access model. Estetika is indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection (Arts & Humanities Citation Index), Scopus, and other databases. According to the 2024 SCImago Journal Rank, it is ranked in Q1 in the fields of literary theory, philosophy, and visual and performing arts.
The new issue, released on 16 March 2026, features five research papers and one symposium. It opens with Christopher Earley’s article, ‘Heterogeneity and Historicity: On What Makes Art Contemporary’. Earley argues that belonging to the category of contemporary art consists in a work’s attempt to grapple with its own contingent and historically specific contemporaneity. This condition, he suggests, has some surprising consequences, including the possibility that at least some of Anish Kapoor’s works no longer belong under this heading.
In ‘Band Merch, Silencing, and Aesthetic Community’, Felix Bräuer asks whether people should stop wearing the merchandise of bands they do not listen to. He argues that they should. He draws on the notion of silencing – more commonly discussed in linguistic contexts – to claim that wearing band-related clothing outside a fandom can obstruct the communication of the social meanings such clothing carries for the fan community.
Lorenzo Graziani’s ‘“I Laugh Because I Must Not Weep”: Humour and Existential Angst’ takes its title from Abraham Lincoln’s remark on the role of laughter in moments of sadness and melancholy. Graziani explores the complex relationship between comic amusement and suffering, arguing that humour is not merely a light-hearted response but a profound means of engaging with the absurdities and sorrows of human existence.
In ‘On the Theory of Musical Scores and Its Relation to Work Performance’, Ramón Carnota Méndez defends Goodman’s theory of musical scores and notation – more precisely, a reinterpreted and more strongly epistemic version of it – against objections raised by Stephen Davies.
In ‘The Identity of Ficta and the Place of Authors’, Michele Paolini Paoletti addresses the identity conditions of fictional characters and asks whether the author of a fictional story should be regarded as part of them.
The issue closes with the symposium ‘Six Encounters with Bolzano’s Aesthetics’, introduced by Dominic McIver Lopes. It brings together six short reflections on Bernard Bolzano’s essays on aesthetics. James Shelley and Mohan Matthen discuss Bolzano’s theories of beauty and the arts, Jennifer Judkins approaches Bolzano from the perspective of musical performance practice, and Claire Kirwin, Katalin Makkai, and Sandra Shapshay bring his thought into dialogue with Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, respectively.
Contact: Tereza Hadravova, tereza.hadravova@ff.cuni.cz