Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
his intimate involvement with the New York scene were certainly exposed to
aesthetic ideas through conversation with that remarkable man. Nevertheless,
with the exception of John Dewey’s Art as Experience of 1934, which had a certain
influence on a number of painters, including Thomas Hart Benton and his student
Jackson Pollock, 3 academic aesthetics has been of little interest to modern
artists in the United States.
In this regard it is possible to compare the relations between aesthetics and the
actual practice of the arts to those between the philosophy of science and modern
physics and mathematics. While scientific figures like Einstein and Hilbert were
well versed in philosophy, the problems with which twentieth-century philosophers
have struggled arose out of reflection on developments in science itself, and
have been for the most part happily ignored by the vast majority of working
scientists. Similarly, although artists have been uninterested in aesthetics, contemporary
philosophers of art have largely found their problems—such as the
place of expression in art, the nature of representation and the relation of
art to nature, and, above all, the definition of art—in this century’s art. Just as
twentieth-century physics came to call into question not only classical mechanics
but also fundamental assumptions about the relation between theory and experiment
and the nature of empirical evidence, so various modern art movements
seemingly collided with the understanding of art at the center of the tradition of
aesthetic theory.
Stemming from Enlightenment and Romantic critical thought, this tradition
located the essence of art in perceptual properties of the artistic object—its ability
to evoke an “aesthetic experience” in the viewer, thanks to its “intrinsic
perceptual interest,” what Clive Bell called its possession of “significant form.”
Given this orientation, aesthetic theory could absorb the abstract art that
appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century, despite its challenge to
artistic convention, without much difficulty. Stiffer tests were posed by various
anti-art movements, by the readymade, by the Pop appropriation of commercial
imagery, by aspects of Minimalism and by the Conceptualist near-disappearance
of the art object itself.
While most philosophers of art simply kept their distance from contemporary
developments, thus maintaining the irrelevance of their work to artists Newman
had noted, a few responded theoretically to anti-art. The so-called institutional
theory of art, representing an anti-aesthetic trend within aesthetics, made its
appearance in 1964 in an article written by Arthur Danto under (so Danto said)
the influence of Andy Warhol’s Stable Gallery show of that year, but reflecting
issues raised much earlier by Marcel Duchamp. 4 George Dickie produced his
3 See Stewart Buettner, “John Dewey and the visual arts in America,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 33 (1975), pp. 381–91. Dewey’s introduction to Alexander Dorner’s The Way Beyond
‘Art’: The Work of Herbert Bayer (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), dedicated to him, provides
another example of that philosopher’s contact with the art world.
4 Arthur Danto, “The artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61:19 (1964), pp. 571–84.
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