Abstract

Contingency has an essential importance in the world, and its investigation can be really useful for the better understanding of many aspects of art and aesthetics too. Aesthetic contingency is quite paradoxical: artistic activity seems to contain both design, necessity, rules, pre-planned aspects and at the same time contingent elements, chance, accidents and unforeseen results. While creation always contained some degree of chance, the aesthetic potential of contingency started to become an important topic, and one to be explicitly investigated in the twentieth century. This introduction surveys some of the positions in the theoretical discussions about contingency with its relationship with aesthetics.