Deliciously Vicious: Not Like Us as a Case Study for Aesthetic Contextualism

In this paper, I defend a version of aesthetic contextualism by examining the aesthetic practice of creating and appreciating diss tracks. Section 1 introduces three core concepts from social ontology: grounding, anchoring, and social practices. Section 2 employs these concepts and argues that the aesthetic practice of creating and appreciating diss tracks ‘anchors’ a ‘frame’ in which the negative moral properties of an artwork directly grounds its positive aesthetic properties. Section 3 expands the discussion and shows how we can use these concepts to clarify and evaluate existing positions in the moralist debate. The upshot is that we should do more substantive aesthetic theorizing and pay closer attention to a wider variety of aesthetic practices. Doing so can have payoffs that go beyond the moralist debate in aesthetics.