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"Aesthetic Confluences between the Everyday and Nature’s Experience"

No. 72 (2025): Thémata Revista de Filosofía

Respecting the Hexagon: Honeycomb Ornament and Attentive Practices in Bee-Art

DOI
https://doi.org/10.12795/themata.2025.i72.05
Submitted
September 15, 2025
Published
2025-12-31

Abstract

The growing cultural attention to bees, exemplified by hives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, raises the question of the extent to which they can be regarded as co-creators of art. This article interweaves György Lukács’s notion of ornament, Yuriko Saito’s aesthetics of care, and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of becoming-animal to examine interspecies collaboration. The work of Czech artist Jan Karpíšek shows how beekeeping and bee-art challenge anthropocentric notions of authorship. The article calls for rethinking animals as co-creators in art, highlighting respect and interspecies aesthetics as vital for understanding nonhuman agency.

References

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