Old Masters and New Lessons - Grant Kester

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.