Study On Aesthetics-oriented Public Leisure

With more and more holidays, leisure has become the most popular part of people’s daily life. Leisure is the activity people choose freely to gain relaxing, enjoyable and free experience and development in their spare time, and as a process of "becoming man" and a main space for fulfilling some personal and social undertakings (quoted from John Kelly, a US scholar on leisure), is a space and stage for people’s self-development and self-fulfillment. Studying the use and arrangement of free time and the quality of people’s leisure life is of much significance to the individual and social progress. This thesis adopts the methods of literature analysis, questionnaire and statistical analysis to study the aesthetic orientation of public leisure, and is divided into six parts (chapters):In chapter I, the theme is put forward. The author made a questionnaire survey on the public leisure life during December2011to March2012, and found that although some few people were able to choose the ways of leisure favorable to physical and mental pleasure, emotional and rational coordination and career promotion, a larger group of people had not used their leisure time efficiency and reasonably, as their leisure life showed the orientation to indulgence, similarity and consumption, in particular, the ways of leisure were singular, passive and sluggish, the experience of leisure remained at the feeling of simple happiness or content, and the choice of leisure is based on no special purpose and lack independence.In chapter Ⅱ, the related issues on leisure and aesthetics will be discussed in general, and the thinking in the study will be introduced. aesthetics is similar to leisure on the aspects of feeling, pleasure experience, freedom, happiness pursuance and creativity orientation. The academic circle has made abundant study on the relationship between leisure and aesthetics, value among both of them, the characteristics and development of leisure aesthetics and the leisure-oriented aesthetic economy. Now, it has been publicly admitted that aesthetics is able to promote the leisure, and the researchers have put forward the concept of "aesthetic leisure". However, the current researches have mainly been on theory or the statement of thinking; it has been in the weak side for the study on how aesthetics is to promote leisure and on how leisure is to transform to aesthetics; besides, the current researches have not given the specific operative routes for that relationship.Based on the thinking on beyond issues, this research will try to build the ideology, theory and practicing of public leisure towards aesthetics.Chapter II will define the aesthetic orientation of pubic leisure. The aesthetic orientation of leisure refers to the activities of aesthetics that transform the leisure factors into the object of aesthetics through combining the beauty of leisure itself and its forms, so as to enable the highly coordinated interaction between the inner and outer beauty of the leisure activities, so that the people in leisure will gain the relaxing, enjoyable and free experiences. The key points of transformation are the transformation of various leisure factors and that after the transformation, people can find a new status of coordinated harmony, and the starting point of the transformation shall be to guid the leisure activities of the public and to improve the quality of such activities.In chapter IV, the characteristics of aesthetics-oriented public leisure are analyzed. The aesthetics-oriented leisure shall not only be enjoyable but also give aesthetic feeling, and not only give physical consent but also convey cultural connotation and spiritual guidance, and not only provide various options but also improve the aesthetic quality of the people. Enabling the public leisure to have the feeling, spirit and rationality (virtues) in aesthetics means that the public leisure will be featured not only with enjoyableness, but also with the characteristics of beautiful feeling, combination of emotion and rationality and the focus of spirit. Such a way of leisure is true and beautiful from the perspective of emotion, so that it satisfies the needs of the people in belonging, sociality, love and self-realization, and is a free upgrading from the perspective of spirit, so that it is guided in values, will and meanings, and is a goodwill with limits enforced by rationality, so that it is an active and beneficial aesthetic freedom rather than the fake freedom based on obedience and imitation.Chapter V will discuss the specific design of transformation toward aesthetics. The transformation shall focus on the problems of public leisure itself, changing from singular to multiple forms, passive acceptance to active seeking, sensory joy to spiritual guidance, and passive obedience to free choice.Based on psychological analysis, aesthetic transformation design shall be done on the major points of the objectives, the content and the organization, trying to establish the aesthetic relations between the leisure activities and the people in leisure. Chapter VI gives the idea that the aesthetic education regarding leisure is the premise and basis in the efforts of transforming the leisure activities towards aesthetics. The aesthetic education helps the public understand the value of leisure, so as to ensure they can make progress from leisure, cultivate their skills of leisure as to provide the feeling and confidence of "joyfulness", breed their interests as to supply them with abundant feelings to choose multiple ways of leisure, and guide their life attitude as to be inspired that "life is an art" and gain the aesthetic feeling of life. In the end, people will make the transformation of their leisure activities initiatively, and use their leisure time in an aesthetic way, so that they will grow, advance and develop.Based on the theory of Karl Marx on people’s free and allround development, this research can be regarded as a tentative study with leisure as the subject and aiming at contribute to the applied aesthetics. The creative point lies in that beyond the long existing ideas of the academic circle on aesthetics-oriented leisure, it clarifies the through pairs of basic contradictions between leisure and aesthetics, builds some partial theory of aesthetic transformation of the public leisure activities towards aesthetics (such as the objectives, the principles and the design) and the relevant prerequisite strategies of practice (aesthetic education). Further research in future may supplement it by adding some new theories and establishing the theoretical models that give specific operational steps, and by designing appropriate experiments to verify the feasibility and validity of the thinking, theory and models presented in this research. The value of the research lies in that it is a good experiment on enabling the aesthetics to go out of the ivory tower and guide the specific life or leisure activities, so that it is somewhat an example to the application of aesthetics in media, recreation and sports, and if well-adopted, it can guide the people’s leisure activities and improve their quality.