Call for papers

ECHO – Interdisciplinary Journal of Communication Languages, Cultures, Socities 

CFP issue no. 8/2026, edited by Vincenzo Susca and Phillipe Joron

                                                                      Beauty and Artifice.

                            Arts, Aesthetics, and Everyday Life in the Contemporary Imaginary

Beauty no longer resides – at least not solely, nor primarily – in the places where the art system preserved and displayed it, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. It now flows toward semantic basins other than those of museums, galleries, and academies. It springs from improbable sites, seeps through practices, scenes, and bodies peripheral to political and cultural nerve centers, and permeates forms unimaginable to the classical artistic intelligentsia – from water bottles to sneakers, from eyebrows to unicorns, from NFTs to the kittens of the web. In an age of hyper-visibility, perpetual connectivity, and the widespread aestheticization of existence, beauty seems to have lost its privileged locus without thereby dissolving. On the contrary, it migrates, fragments, and disperses: it abandons the institutional settings that long safeguarded it in order to infiltrate the territories of the ordinary, digital flows, urban and symbolic margins, everyday practices, and bodies. It is no longer a rare object to be contemplated from a distance, but an atmospheric condition – ubiquitous and unstable – that envelops social life, transforms it, and stages it. The forthcoming issue of Echo seeks to examine the contemporary metamorphosis of beauty through the increasingly evident tension between art and artifice, between aesthetic experience and technical dispositifs, between the desire for authenticity and the proliferation of simulacra. In a world in which images, media, algorithms, and objects seem to overshadow subjects, what status does beauty assume today? What form does aesthetic experience take when it becomes entangled with reels, memes, filters, avatars, immersive platforms, and generative artificial intelligences? What remains of art and its public when the distinction between spectators and creators thins to the point of dissolution, giving rise to hybrid figures of distributed authorship and performative participation? Far removed from both restorative nostalgias and technophilic enthusiasms, the publication invites perspectives, research, and approaches capable of venturing into the hybrid territories where the meaning of an aestheticized present is at stake. Here, beauty cannot be reduced to a category of taste or a mere ornament of the world; it instead takes shape as a symbolic battleground, a zone of friction between euphoria and unease, enchantment and disquiet, the sublime and the grotesque. From this standpoint, artifice is not the opposite of truth, but one of its contemporary modes of emergence: a luminous wound that exposes, reveals, and at the same time disorients. The artistic, media, and cultural practices under consideration traverse different disciplines and languages in order to convey the complexity of a landscape in which art does not die, but disperses into everyday life, is recreated in minimal gestures, digital rituals, marginal aesthetics, and remnants. In this diaspora of beauty, life itself – along with the world as a whole – tends to become a work, while the work is transformed into event, experience, and relation. The aim of the issue is therefore to explore the forms through which beauty is today inhabited, performed, and consumed, without separating “high” arts from popular cultures, nor institutional languages from emerging and underground expressions. Contributions adopting transdisciplinary and transmedial perspectives will be particularly welcome, especially those capable of reading the contemporary imaginary as an entanglement of aesthetic practices, technical dispositifs, and forms of life. The issue welcomes theoretical and empirical contributions, analytical or experimental in orientation, from fields such as – first and foremost – the sociology of the imaginary, of art, and of communication, as well as mediology, aesthetics, art history, and cultural studies, provided they interrogate beauty not as a stable value or a mere category of taste, but as an unstable and artificial process, an environment situated at the crossroads of art and everyday life.

Deadlines:

Abstract (500 words): 13th of March 2026                    

Notification of acceptance: 14th of April 2026

Article submission: 30th of June 2026                                 

Publication: 30th of November 2026

Length of articles: max 7000 words

To submit an article, write to: rivista.echo@uniba.it, vincenzo.susca@univ-montp3.fr

Essential Bibliography