Introduction

This issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics is the second issue, and the first of its kind, since we took over the editorship in the summer of 2023.In contrast to our first edited issue-a questionnaire on "Aesthetics in the Age of Unreason"-this issue consists of a small selection of the articles submitted to the journal.It therefore also covers a much broader and heterogeneous field of aesthetic theory and beyond.Let's call it an "open issue."The first article is written by Devika Sharma and is entitled "Skeptimentality: The Square and the Aesthetics of Complicity."In the article, Sharma identifies and discusses a "sensibility of privilege," a particular structure of feeling and aesthetic mode dominant in Scandinavian public cultures, which she calls skeptimentality.In contrast to the familiar notion of sentimentality-theorized by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Laurent Berlant-which conveys a positive "meta-response" to a positive "basic feeling," the skeptimental mode is more ambiguous.Its "meta-response" is not positive but generally negative, and its modus operandi is therefore not sympathy but complicity; not trust in the virtue of oneself and the world, but mistrust.For Sharma, this aesthetic mode is at stake in Ruben stlund's film The Square, which problematizes Scandinavian public culture's own struggle with its "predicament of privilege," the logic of which is expressed in the seemingly banal question: "Is this okay?"