Old Masters and New Lessons - Grant Kester

Art Journal (Spring 1997)
Learning from Aesthetics: Old Masters and New Lessons
In the Aesthetic State everything - even the tool which serves - is a free citizen, having equal
rights with the noblest; and the mind, which would force the patient mass beneath the yoke of its
purposes, must here first obtain its assent.
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1792(1)
The essays in this issue of Art Journal explore some of the complex meanings generated by the
concept of the aesthetic within contemporary art and culture. The contributors pursue the
aesthetic through a range of sites and domains: from the silvered corpse of Joseph Jernigan
floating in the ether of cyberspace, to the multimedia spectacle of the Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington, D.C., to the creation of wall-sized digital montages in London's
Docklands. There is a common interest throughout in expanding the conceptual scope of the
aesthetic beyond the sanctioned domain of the solitary artist and work of art to include a range of
practices and conditions that inform everyday life.
The idea for this issue began with my interest in the much heralded "return" to beauty in
art making and art criticism a few years ago. This movement was catalyzed by Dave Hickey's
influential book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993) and soon grew into a
torrent of interviews, special issues of magazines, and assorted commentaries.(2) Hickey's book,
and the general interest in beauty that followed from it, did much to refocus the attention of artists,
critics, and art historians on the sensual and somatic dimension of aesthetic experience, which
had been neglected under the arid regime of the "anti-aesthetic." In responding to this neglect,
however, many of the proponents of beauty seem to have abandoned in turn some of the
valuable insights into the contingency of the aesthetic provided by critical theory and postmodern
art practice during the last decade and a half. Thus the "ground" of beauty, as Peter Dunn and
Loraine Leeson have noted, has all too often been ceded to those who speak on behalf of the
body and the aesthetic from a highly traditional, and in some cases even conservative, point of
view.(3) The essays herein seek a return to the aesthetic that preserves its full complexity as a
cultural, political, and sensual form of experience. This has led many of the contributors to

eexamine the origins of the aesthetic in early modern philosophy. What they have found there is
a concept of aesthetic knowledge that is rooted in both the private body and the body politic. In
fact, it is in the very nature of the aesthetic that it is located at the intersection between the
experience of subjective autonomy and the subject-positions provided by a dominant culture.
Hickey's book did much to reignite interest in the powerful visual experience provided by
the work of art, but his argument loses its focus at precisely the point at which this experience
engages with broader forms of discursive knowledge and public subjectivity. Hickey begins his
book by evoking a nightmarishly Orwellian scenario in which a politically correct thought police
dominate a well-funded network of "alternative" art spaces. This liberal elite, painfully out of
touch with the vox populi of good old-fashioned bodily experience, have shackled the
subversively beautiful art object in the basement in order to satisfy their fiendish desire to
improve and infantilize the museum-going public. Hickey establishes a curious parallel between
the alternative arts sector and the world of private galleries and auction houses. Thus, a
"massive civil service" of arts administrators in charge of a vast apparatus of "publicly funded"
exhibition spaces is juxtaposed to a "handful" of beleaguered dealers and gallery owners, who,
if somewhat too ready to "nibble canapes on the Concorde," are at least honest about their
relationship to the market and are more than willing to embrace the ambiguous pleasures of
aesthetic desire.(4) The fact that this characterization could be persuasively advanced at a time
when literally dozens of nonprofit exhibition spaces, publications, and media centers were being
forced to close owing to drastic funding cuts and conservative political attacks suggests the
emotional power of Hickey's underlying message for many in the art world.
Hickey's essays deploy all the accouterments of classic bohemianism; "the street" is a
persistent point of reference, along with sneering references to scandalized "church ladies."(5)
We find him rifling through Mapplethorpe's "X" portfolio in a "coke dealer's penthouse," or
evoking the origins of Mapplethorpe's work in "smoky, crowded rooms with raw brick walls [and]
sawhorse bars."(6) Hickey poses as a kind of critic provocateur, hurling his "outrageous" epithets
at the indifferent monolith of the art establishment.(7) At the center of this avant-garde mise en
scene is the artwork that magically eludes any deadening "institutional" mediation to strike up a
direct and spontaneous relationship with the viewer. This exchange may take place in a

Manhattan penthouse or in a smoke-filled bar but it certainly can't occur in a glacial "postmodern
ice box."(8) Just what would a work of art outside of some form of institutional mediation look
like? And how would we recognize it? It is the "rhetorical" power of the artwork that marks it off
from other cultural objects, according to Hickey; its suasive ability to bring us into direct contact
with a radically different set of values or model of subjectivity.(9)
On the one hand, by embracing "dangerous" or "transgressive" art that is willfully
indifferent to its own cultural responsibilities, Hickey wants to reject what he views as the liberal
do-goodism of an engaged art that treats the viewer as a child to be educated. At the same
moment Hickey cannot entirely abandon the Enlightenment tradition, which insists that the
aesthetic has a moral function, if not necessarily a moral intention. He postulates the experience
of beauty as an unfolding cognitive operation in which we are first drawn in and made receptive
by the sensory pleasure of beauty, and then confronted with the presence of a radically different
subjectivity (e.g., Mapplethorpe's renegade sexuality).(10) Thus the artwork is an expression of
the artist's own "moral and political construction of the visual world" that he communicates to the
viewer through techniques of beauty that excite visual pleasure.(11) Rather than simply
defending the value of a private aesthetic pleasure, Hickey is concerned to identify some
relationship between "private desire" and "public virtue."(12) It is not the fact that art might have a
moral/pedagogical function that Hickey objects to, but rather the means by which this function is
exercised on the viewer. Thus aesthetic experience destabilizes our sense of identity and leads
us to an "anxious" consciousness that is appropriate to the political condition of contemporary
society. After undergoing an aesthetic experience, the viewer's subjectivity is transformed in
such a way that he or she becomes a more capable participant in "democratic" discourse.(13)
The beautiful artwork induces a kind of therapeutic libertarianism, forcing the viewer to make
"moral decisions" without recourse to cultural or political absolutes.(14) This is, unfortunately, the
point in Hickey's analysis that is most ambiguous. How does he define democracy? What form of
agency do his "anxious" subjects exercise? What is the relationship between the privatized and
physical aesthetic encounter and discursive knowledge?
It is precisely this ambiguity that links Hickey's account of beauty to a nexus of questions

about the aesthetic that stretches back over two centuries to the writings of such figures as Kant,
Lessing, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume.(15) The following essays seek to build on, and
also complicate, the questions of aesthetic experience that have been raised by Hickey and
others during the last few years. At the same time they seek to establish a critical rapprochement
with the "return" to the aesthetic in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. Thus we might
consider Hickey's embrace of beauty in relation to recent work by such scholars as Howard
Caygill, David Wellbery, Luc Ferry, D. N. Rodowick, Susan Buck-Morss, and Terry Eagleton,
among others.(16) Here the "return" to the aesthetic is precisely an attempt to recapture a
broader understanding of the term, prior to its specification to the experience of the work of art in
the nineteenth century. For Kant the term "aesthetic" is used in both Critique of Pure Reason, to
refer to a priori sense-based experience, and Critique of Judgment, to refer to a disinterested
"reflective judgment" epitomized by the experience of "taste."(17) Although Alexander
Baumgarten, who coined the term "aesthetic" in his Reflections on Poetry (1735), was
concerned with questions of art making (specifically poetics), he also defined the aesthetic in
terms of somatic experience ("the science of sensory cognition") rather than beauty per se.(18)
The aesthetic also functions within Enlightenment philosophy (and later in the work of Hegel) as
a political figure for the relationship between the individual subject and a social totality, such as
the "state." It is this political dimension of the aesthetic that is examined by Greig Crysler and
Abidin Kusno in their reading of the Holocaust Memorial Museum and its construction of a
national subject on the basis of a process of bodily identification.
We can identify both a politically symbolic aesthetic and a somatic aesthetic; an aesthetic
predicated on public discourse and an aesthetic predicated on bodily knowledge. Or rather, as I
have suggested above, we might say that the aesthetic is located precisely between these two
points. The complex position of the aesthetic originates in the political and epistemological crisis
brought about by the erosion of monarchical and religious authority and the accession of the
bourgeoisie to political power during the eighteenth century. These two events threatened to
sunder the signifying chain of divine right. The social cohesion provided by the feudal system
(albeit often by force) was dissolved. But what would take its place? What power could hold the
social order together? This question became even more pressing under the impact of the rising

market economy in which traditional forms of social organization were subjected to what Marx
described as the "everlasting uncertainty and agitation" created by capitalism.(19) Much of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment can be read simultaneously as a critique of absolutism and as a
search for a new epistemological foundation to replace it. From Lord Shaftesbury's je ne sais
quoi to Adam Smith's "invisible hand," philosophers were obsessed with uncovering some
principle that could bring harmony and coordination to the complex play of interests and classes
that made up eighteenth-century European social order.
The aesthetic emerges with such urgency during the eighteenth century because it
promises to reveal a (noncoercive) cognitive ground that can guarantee a universal standard of
judgment. It is through this "anthropological ontology"(20) that Kant discovers a prior unity that
can resolve the contradiction between subjective experience and objective judgment. As Kant
notes:
The cognitive powers brought into play by [aesthetic] presentation are in free play, because no
determinant concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition. . . . This state of free play of
the cognitive powers, accompanying a presentation by which the object is given, must be
universally communicable; for cognition, the determination of the object with which given
presentations are to harmonize (in any subject whatever) is the only way of presenting that holds
for everyone.(21)
The feeling of (bodily) pleasure that is produced by the cooperation of the imagination and the
understanding is a signifier for Kant of the underlying correspondence between the individual
subject and the "universal voice" (Kant's variant of Shaftesbury's sensus communis or "common
sense").(22) It provides the calming reassurance that we are, beneath it all (or perhaps, above it
all), rational subjects and at least potentially capable of achieving a political consensus by virtue
of that fact that we all experience the world through the same basic cognitive operations. The
"common sense" (Gemeinsinn) achieved by aesthetic reflection evokes a utopian community in
which our most personal and intuitive responses to the world around us are immediately
validated by the collective experience of our fellow citizens. This "aesthetic state" further
presupposes the existence of a "public sphere" (premised on what Kant defines as "publicity") in
which free and open debate among equals always results in an absolute but non-coercive
consensus because each subject is able to overcome their own petty differences and judge from

the vantage point of a transcendent greater good.(23)
Although Kant is concerned to differentiate aesthetic judgment from moral judgment by
virtue of its non-instrumental or disinterested character, the very experience evoked by the
aesthetic, the intuition of a universal voice, clearly has moral and political implications about
which one could hardly remain indifferent. It is, after all, the aesthetic that claims to reconcile the
purely subjective experience of beauty with the "objective" conditions necessary for political
discourse and will formation. The unresolved relationship between the moral and the aesthetic in
Kant's philosophy is marked by his recourse to a poetics of ambiguity. Although there is no
causal relationship or "intrinsic affinity" (innere Affinitat) between morality and taste, it is
nevertheless the case that our sense of beauty is provided with a form of moral "guidance"
(geleitet, a word that also has the connotation of a military escort [Ak298]). Thus, despite Kant's
insistence on the neutrality of aesthetic judgment, there is clearly an active moral and
pedagogical element at work: the aesthetic "teaches us to like even objects of sense freely"
(Ak354), and in the act of experiencing beauty we are conscious of the fact that our mind is
"being ennobled" (Veredlung [Ak353]).(24)
This ambiguity between the moral and the aesthetic is characteristic of what philosopher
Anthony Cascardi has termed the tradition of "aesthetic liberalism."(25) It also marks Hickey's
account of a "rhetorical" beauty.(26) There are two components of Hickey's analysis that are of
particular relevance here. First is his commitment to the "work of art" as a specifically privileged
vehicle for inducing an "aesthetic" awareness, defined as a mode of cognition that provides a
conduit between somatic experience (the felt pleasure of beauty) and a ground for
intersubjective communication. This conduit itself has a highly developed symbolic value, and,
although it is often only vaguely defined, it typically makes reference to some form of social or
political consensus (in Hickey's case "democracy"). Second, the experience of the work of art is
understood as a paradigm for the construction of an exemplary subjectivity. This is an essentially
private encounter between the viewer (defined as a monadic subject) and the artwork (as the
material expression of another monadic subject), which must remain free of any external
"mediation." It is this belief in an unmediated, and essentially private, encounter that allows
Hickey to ignore any contextual distinctions between, for example, the market conditions of the

gallery sector and the market conditions of the nonprofit "alternative" arts sector.(27) We might
contrast this with the interest shown by the contributors here in collaborative modes of
production. Jill Casid and Maria DeGuzman, for example, organize their projects through
"collaboration agreements" among their friends and colleagues. They write: "These agreements
and our praxis of collaboration are for us a means to intervene in the persistent myth of
individualism that lies behind so much of U.S. culture's rhetoric of community and consensus.
Furthermore, through this process of collaboration we attempt to contest the aesthetic fetish of
the authorial trace central to the institutions of connoisseurship and the image market." Peter
Dunn and Loraine Leeson describe their practice as the result of "a transformation through
critique, collaboration, and communication [in which] . . . social and visual processes [are]
inextricably linked. . . . the work forms a lens that creates a focal point in the energies of
transformation. Desire focused is passion, and what is socialized passion but aesthetics?"
The political dimension of the aesthetic is explicit in the work of Schiller as well as Hegel.
Their concern is not merely with works of art, but with political and cultural subjectivity on a
broad social scale. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793), Schiller provides a prescient
diagnosis of the effect of a market-based society in which "material needs reign supreme and
bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke." It is a society in which "we see not
merely individuals, but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their potentialities,
while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain." The effect of this society is
to fragment and divide human nature. Schiller advocates a therapeutic turn to the aesthetic to
"restore . . . the totality of our nature."(28) Aesthetic knowledge has the redemptive capacity to
imagine and figure a more holistic and humane set of social relations. The aesthetic can be
taken as an implicit criticism of the existing social system, which has failed to realize the utopian
potential contained in the relationship between viewer and artwork. However, in order to achieve
this perspective the aesthetic must stand "outside" existing society.
In his Philosophy of Right Hegel uses the concept of aesthetic distance to describe the
function of the state as a "disinterested" observer, attending not to the "various parts" of society,
but to the larger patterns formed by the interrelationship of these parts, and ultimately to society
as it could be, rather than as it is.(29) This is the utopian moment of the aesthetic as that mode of

knowledge that can transgress existing boundaries of knowledge and transcend the here and
now to envision a more just and equitable society. The aesthetic grasps the complex totality of
social relations and is thereby able to recognize the effect of the market in generating systematic
inequalities. It combines both a unique form of knowledge and a desire for social improvement.
Our perception of works of art here and now allows us to glimpse the possibility of an Ideal future
in which all of our social relationships would allow for the simultaneous and non-coercive
expression of the individual and the universal. The aesthetic functions as a token (to be
redeemed at some unspecified future date) of a more integrated relationship between life and
labor, and as a symbolic embodiment of a world that could be.
The aesthetic strikes a Faustian bargain, however, which allows it to think utopia but only
at the cost of never being able to try to bring it about. As Schiller wrote in 1793:
It is in the world of semblance alone that [the artist] possesses [a] sovereign right, in the
insubstantial realm of the imagination; and he possesses it there only as long as he scrupulously
refrains from predicating real existence of it in theory, and as long as he renounces all idea of
imparting real existence through it in practice.(30)
Even as he refuses practical engagement, however, the artist is compensated by the
transcendent power of the aesthetic. The artist emerges as the ideal "disinterested" subject of
modern liberalism, able to shed the cultural accouterment of a specific identity and to speak in
and through a universalized aesthetic experience. In the case of Hegel's analogous political
reading of the aesthetic, while the state is able to recognize the deleterious effects of the market,
he refuses to grant it the authority to challenge the preeminence of the market dynamic in
determining social relations. The state can observe, and even judge, civil society from the
vantage point of a teleological social progress, but it is prevented from realizing this progress
through any practical intervention in market forces. For Hegel, the market retains the status of an
environment in which the play of forces between consumer and producer and owner and worker
proceeds in a "nature-like" way and must be insulated from state interference. Thus, although
Hegel was sympathetic to the plight of the poor created by the market forces at work in civil
society, he was at the same time reluctant to suggest that the state should offer any large-scale
program of aid to the "penurious rabble" for fear of disrupting the moral economy of capitalism in

which success or failure in the market is the sole determinant of one's well-being.(31)
For Hegel, the solution to the crisis of civil society is not for the "aesthetic state" to modify
the actions of the market or to challenge the centrality of property rights through any form of
public regulation, but rather to expand the boundaries of the market itself, to open up new
territories or frontiers to economic exploitation. "The inner dialectic of civil society thus drives it,"
as Hegel writes, "to push beyond its limits and seek markets, and so its necessary means of
subsistence, in other lands, which are either deficient in the goods it has over-produced, or else
generally backward in industry." Colonization of "backward" lands by "mature" civil society is
Hegel's solution.(32) Thus, if the aesthetic state transcends civil society, the state itself is subject
to a regulatory principle in the form of the market. Property, the "inner dialectic" of civil society,
ultimately "transcends," and frames, the authority of the state in Hegel's political economy. It is
for this reason that Hickey's indifference to the specificity of market functions in framing aesthetic
experience is symptomatic. The recognition that the market makes itself felt in almost every
cultural domain all too easily becomes an excuse to neglect the important differences that
pertain among these sites. And the rejection of the nonprofit arts sector slides easily into an
uncritical embrace of the glamorous world of galleries, dealers, collectors, and auction houses.
(33)
Aesthetic liberalism offers the image of a better life. But so long as the market retains its
transcendent status in liberal political theory, the telos of a more just and equitable social order
will remain virtual, and the experience of a universal subjectivity will remain the sole province of
those who can afford it. It is this teleological dimension that links the aesthetic judgment of the
bourgeois subject and the political judgment of the liberal state. They each embody Kant's
"finality without end" (Zweckmassigkeit ohne Zweck) by "straining toward the end" that they are
by definition prevented from reaching.(34) Thus we are left with the conclusion reached by
Schiller, in his consideration of the "promise" of an aesthetic utopia on earth:
In the Aesthetic State everything - even the tool which serves - is a free citizen, having equal
rights with the noblest; and the mind, which would force the patient mass beneath the yoke of its
purposes, must here first obtain its assent. . . But does such a State of Aesthetic Semblance
really exist? And if so, where is it to be found? As a need it exists in every finely tuned soul; as a
realized fact, we are likely to find it, like the pure Church and the pure Republic, only in some
chosen circles, where conduct is governed, not by some soulless imitations of the manners and

morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature we have made our own.(35)
One can postulate ideal forms of society endlessly, but without also engaging the difficult
questions raised by how these models might be applied, they remain ineffectual abstractions. On
the one hand, the aesthetic provides an autonomous refuge or sanctuary apart from
instrumentality and self-interest. At the same time, the aesthetic serves as a kind of navigational
marker toward the telos of a society that is united in a non-coercive common sense. But the very
disengagement from the object (and by extension, from worldly concerns) that provides the
disinterested outlook with a perspective from which to criticize existing social values (and from
which to imagine something better) also prevents it from engaging in any concrete way with the
forms of political and social power that maintain, and are maintained by, those values. The
principle of an Enlightenment aesthetic is denied any means of practical or empirical application.
Its effects can be produced only in the realm of ideas, and the actual transformation of society
remains a teleological principle rather than a practical goal.
This issue seeks to challenge the disengagement of the aesthetic from political discourse
not by denying the knowledge produced by the body and the senses, but by analyzing the ways
in which this knowledge both resists and collaborates with forms of social, cultural, and political
power. In place of a preoccupation with beauty the following essays might be said to concern
themselves with the political economy of the aesthetic. Dunn and Leeson call for a new
"aesthetics of collaboration" based on "interdisciplinary approaches to change in our
environment, culture, and communications." Susan Buck-Morss discusses the "anesthetizing"
effect of modern culture, which works to suppress our bodily capacity for "critical cognition." She
rejects the idea that sense-based experience can be partitioned from a political consciousness,
arguing instead that "cultural meanings are sensed bodily as being wrong." "How else," argues
Buck-Morss, "are people capable of social protest? . . . I want to say that aesthetics is the body's
form of critical cognition, and that this sensory knowledge can and should be trusted politically."
Greig Crysler and Abidin Kusno suggest that Hickey's "therapeutic institutions" (even those with
no particular interest in "art" per se) are quite capable of deploying aesthetic techniques that
engage the viewer on the level of somatic or bodily experience.(36) Thus, the Holocaust

Memorial Museum employs a veritable phantasmagoria of visual and aural techniques to solicit
the viewer's identification with a series of pre-established subject positions designed to advance
a liberal teleology. The image of the Jewish victim/witness proffered in the museum is the result
of a process of abstraction that epitomizes the operation of Hegel's "aesthetic state." As a result
of this process Judaism is made co-extensive with the emergence of the modern liberal state,
while its specific "empirical" identity as a religious and cultural practice is extruded as mere
"difference."
Alla Efimova identifies a surprisingly strong commitment to the power of aesthetic
experience in the midst of the ostensibly stolid and unimaginative art of Stalinist Russia. Rather
than dry didacticism, such artists as Arkady Rylov, Alexander Laktionov, and Konstantin Youn
constantly sought to evoke what Soviet art historian A. A. Fedorov-Davydov described as a
"vivid aesthetic pleasure." Efimova points to ways in which Soviet artists negotiated their
commitment to an affective visuality even as they worked within the strictures of Socialist Realist
doctrine. Howard Caygill draws directly from early modern aesthetic philosophy to investigate
the performances and projects of the Greek-Australian artist Stelarc. Drawing on neglected
sections of the Critique of Judgment, Caygill outlines a Kantian model of subjectivity and agency
based on an unresolved tension between mind and body, "inside" and "outside," and art and
cultural transformation. Stelarc's works, according to Caygill, both challenge and extend Kant's
understanding of the relationship between technology and the human subject through their
prosthetic "reorganization of the body." In their Artists' Pages, Jill Casid and Maria DeGuzman
interrogate the foundations of modern aesthetics in the faux universality of the eighteenth-century
man of delicate taste. Through the staging of mock "tableaux," Casid, DeGuzman, and their
collaborators seek to position "women and people of color as agents rather than as objects or
icons of the primitive past, of nature, matter, or preindustrial society." Finally, Sarat Maharaj
provides an outline of another set of collaborations: the Monkeydoodle project developed at
Goldsmiths' College. Drawing on the influences of John Cage, Daniel Spoerri, Marcel Duchamp,
and James Joyce, Maharaj's students challenge the tyranny of the analytic aesthetic through an
"aconceptual" mode that blurs the boundaries between discourse and figure, and between the
essay and the work of art. Taken together the following essays and projects offer a range of

meditations on the current status of the aesthetic that seek to preserve its complexity, both
culturally and politically, as a practice and a discourse.
NOTES
1. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson
and L. A. Willoughby (1796; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 219.
2. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press,
1993). See also "'B' Is for Beauty," special issue of New Art Examiner 21, no. 8 (April 1994);
"The Return of Beauty," special issue of Artweek 27, no. 4 (April 1996); Richard Bolton, "Beauty
Redefined: From Ideal Form to Experiential Meaning," New Art Examiner 21, no. 3 (November
1993): 27-31; and Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995).
3. From a draft version of Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson's essay "The Aesthetics of
Collaboration." They wrote: "it has to be acknowledged . . . that in displacing the focus to other,
previously under theorized and under valued powers at work—the social, economic, ideological,
and wider cultural contexts and 'readings' of the art work—many valuable new insights have
been revealed. But a refusal [by postmodern critics] to engage adequately with something so
central to the activity of making and viewing art—the visual power or 'beauty' of the work—left a
gap that enabled the transcendentalists, institutional gate-keepers and neo-Modernists to claim
this ground for their own."
4. Hickey, Invisible Dragon, 13-14.
5. Ibid., 29, 34. According to Hickey, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and Ed Ruscha
"engage individuals within and without the cultural ghetto in arguments about what is good and
what is beautiful. And they do so without benefit of clergy, out on the street, out on the margin"
(24).
6. Ibid., 30, 31.
7. Hickey is associate professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas. He was the 1994 recipient of the Frank Jewett Mather Award, presented by the College
Art Association for distinction in art criticism. He describes his views as "outrageous" in Invisible
Dragon, 12.
8. Ibid., 13.
9. Ibid., 22.
10. It would seem to be the case that Mapplethorpe's images are only confrontational or
transgressive for someone with little or no awareness of gay S/M sexual practices. For other
viewers they might seem simply erotic, or merely banal.
11. "Gorgeous Politics, Dangerous Pleasures: Dave Hickey on Beauty's Subversive Potential,
an Interview by Ann Wiens," New Art Examiner 21, no. 8 (April 1994): 15.

12. Mark Van Proyen, "A Conversation with Dave Hickey, Critic," Artweek 27, no. 4 (April 1996):
14.
13. As Hickey writes: ". . . the vernacular of beauty, in its democratic appeal, remains a potent
instrument for change in this civilization"; Invisible Dragon, 24.
14. Van Proyen, "Conversation with Dave Hickey," 14.
15. Shaftesbury writes of the overwhelming "rhetorical" power of natural beauty: "I shall no
longer resist the passion growing in me for things of a natural kind, where neither art nor the
conceit or caprice of man has spoiled their genuine order by breaking in upon that primitive
state"; Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners,
Opinions, Times, etc., vol. 11, ed. John M. Robertson (1711; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1900), 125.
See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (1790; Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987); Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and
Virtue, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson, ed. Bernhard Fabian (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms Verlag, 1990); David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Essays Moral, Political
and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985); and Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen
McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
16. See Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989); David E. Wellbery,
Lessing's Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic
Age, trans. Robert De Loaiza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); D. N. Rodowick,
"Reading the Figural," Camera Obscura 24 (1991): 11-14, and "Audiovisual Culture and
Interdisciplinary Knowledge," New Literary History 26 (1995): 111-21; Susan Buck-Morss,
"Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62
(Fall 1992): 3-41, and "The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe," October 73 (Summer 1995):
3-26; and Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990). See
also J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno
(University Park: Penn State Press, 1992); and Dave Beech and John Roberts, "Spectres of the
Aesthetic," New Left Review 218 (July/August 1996): 102-27.
17. Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1995), 53-56.
18. In the prolegomena to his Aesthetica (1750-58), Baumgarten gives the aesthetic a
multivalent definition: "The Aesthetic (understood as the theory of free ['liberal'] Art, as an aspect
of epistemology, as the art of beautiful thought - or thought about the beautiful - and the art of
reason analogous to thought) is the science of sense-based cognition"; Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten, Theoretische Asthetik: Die grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der "Aesthetica,” ed. and
trans. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (1780-58; Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983), 1 (translation mine). See
also Alexander Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, trans. K. Aschenbrenner and W. B. Holther
(1735; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954).
19. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto," in Essential Works of Marxism,
ed. Arthur P. Mendel (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 16.
20. Keith Tester, Civil Society (London: Routledge, 1992), 152.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 62/Ak218.

22. Ibid., 60/Ak216.
23. Kant describes judgments of beauty as being "public"; ibid., 57/Ak214. David Wellbery links
this "public" status to the concept of an "ideal speech situation" in the work of Jürgen Habermas
and others: "The ideal of transparency, which in the Enlightenment was conceived in semantic
terms, reappears in the work of Habermas and Apel as a pragmatic ideal: a communicational
exchange in which subjects are transparent to themselves and others. . . . As was the case in
Enlightenment theory, aesthetic representations point forward to a state of freedom in which the
compulsions and opacities of speech are finally overcome"; Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoon, 242.
24. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 164, 229, 228. Kant speaks of the sense of beauty as providing
"a mental attunement [gunstige Gemutsstimmung] favorable to moral feeling" (165/Ak299). And
he argues that someone who displays an interest in the beauty of nature must also have a
"predisposition" (Anlage) to a good moral attitude (167/Ak301). Later he describes the way in
which taste allows us to "make the transition" (macht gleichsam) between the realm of the
senses ("sensible charm") and "habitual moral interest" "without making too violent a leap"
(ohne einen zu gewaltsamen Sprung [229/Ak354]).
25. Cascardi defines aesthetic liberalism in the following way: "The aesthetic moment in Kant
replicates rather than resolves the tensions between the individual and the community that Kant
elsewhere formulates as central to the position of the subject in the modern world. Whereas the
Enlightenment reading of Kant [exemplified by Habermas] sees the third Critique as reflecting a
development of the 'inner logic' of a self-contained aesthetic sphere, and tends to privilege the
public discourse of taste over the experience of art itself, and whereas the Romantic response to
Kant tends to see the Critique of Judgment as a reintegrative and redemptive attempt to restore
unity through the formation of what Schiller called an 'aesthetic state,' to a social totality that had
been shattered by the disintegrative forces of capital, I would suggest that . . . Kant leads us to
conclude that the foundations of the liberal ethic reside not in the cognitive powers of mason or
understanding, but in the (transcendental) imagination which regrounds the liberal state as the
unity of wills under the concept of an end which has subjective claim to universality"; Anthony J.
Cascardi, "Aesthetic Liberalism: Kant and the Ethics of Modernity," Revue Internationale de
Philosophie 45, no. 176 (1991): 12-13.
26. "Gorgeous Politics, Dangerous Pleasures," 15.
27. I don't consider the nonprofit sector to be necessarily "purer" than the gallery world. Rather,
the conditions of the market, economic exchange, and symbolic capital simply operate there in a
different way. However, this difference is of considerable importance in terms of understanding
the function of artists and institutions in each site. See Grant Kester, "Rhetorical Questions: The
Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public," Afterimage 20, no. 6 (January 1993): 10-16.
28. Aesthetic Education of Man, 43. Schiller writes: "Everlastingly chained to a single little
fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear
the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being,
and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more
than the imprint of his occupation of his specialized knowledge"; ibid., 35.
29. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 189.
30. Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, 197.

31. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 150.
32. Ibid., 151 (italics mine).
33. A recent essay on the return of beauty, which actually juxtaposes quotes from Dave Hickey
and Kant, includes an exchange from a 1996 lecture series at the Otis College of Art and Design
at which "one audience member . . . suggest[ed] that galleries are 'the front lines, the risk-takers
in search of pleasure'"; Charlene Roth, "The Light under the Bushel," Artweek 27, no. 4 (April
1996): 13.
34. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 87.
35. Schiller, The Aesthetic Education of Man, 219.
36. Dave Hickey, "After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institution," in
Invisible Dragon, 53-64.