Towards a Theory of Aesthetics of the Margin:Exploring Vernacular Artistic Communities, Beauty, and Social Precarity.

This research offers a distinctive contribution to the sociology of art and holds significant value, as it interrogates the nebulous social dynamics at work within the community of precarious Moroccan art dealers/producers where people seek beauty from where they delicately rot in the margin. By focusing on the marginalized, poverty-ridden communities that dwell in hidden unsightly Moroccan markets, weekly Souqs, café bazaars, and informal transaction locations, I attempt to come to an understanding of how such communities conceive of art in the absence of the most basic forms of decent living. I want to understand the theatrics of this pursuit of beauty and its implications, its motives, its actors, and its paradoxical whereabouts. Is the meaning of beauty a replacement for that of happiness? Where does it begin, and where does it end? And most importantly, can we have enough of it? In essence, the category of beauty cannot be reduced to basic definitions in aesthetics, looks, and shapes for in many cultures like the Moroccan’s, beauty could mean comfort, safety, love, and respect. To come to grips with the role art plays in the everyday of this precarious community, I am looking at what I call an aesthetics of the margin. That is a vernacular aesthetics that takes non-conventional beauty standards at its stage to embrace unconventional and overlooked aesthetic values. This leading theory around the aesthetics of the margin is foregrounded in communities whose arts —and the lack thereof—navigate liminal spaces in art fueled by survival creativity to generate income from within unsatiable marginal urban spaces. Hence, this paper leads by taking an approach to studying marginal urban artistic communities of art dealers and producers in the global south which takes into consideration a plethora of social and economic vulnerabilities, abjections, and precarities.