Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
To do this is to classify it as a work of art. It is by being set into relation to the
field of art that “anti-aesthetic” art, like earlier art, has its social significance.
Although by different means, it seeks like the art of the past to provide an experience
serving the exercise of a sensibility momentarily freed from engagement
in the daily business of life, and thus emblematic at once of the privilege signified
by such freedom and of the art lover’s worthiness to enjoy it. (It is, of course, just
the distance from the demands of life experienced even in the representation of
those demands, say by documentary photography or explicitly political art, that
is signified, in Kant’s conception, by the concept of the aesthetic.)
This explains the paradox of anti-art noted by Bourdieu, that
Nothing more clearly reveals the logic of the functioning of the artistic
field than the fate of these apparently radical attempts at subversion.
Because they expose the act of artistic creation to a mockery already
annexed to the artistic tradition by Duchamp, they are immediately
converted into artistic “acts,” recorded as such and thus consecrated
and celebrated by the makers of taste. Art cannot reveal the truth about
art without snatching it away again by turning the revelation into an
artistic event. 44
Perhaps among artists Andy Warhol understood this best; at any rate he made
use of it as the basis for his artistic career. Once art was separated from aesthetics
as traditionally understood, he saw, it could be treated as a marketing category—
one that maintained its original luxury character. Thus Warhol could appreciate
the aesthetics of commercial design and describe art as “just another job” while
preserving the definition of art in terms of autonomy: “An artist is somebody who
produces things that people don’t need to have but that he—for some reason—
thinks it would be a good idea to give [sic!] them.” 45 The philosophical treatment
of Warhol’s work as revealing the theoretical (or “institutional,” analyzed in an
abstract and ahistorical way) nature of art is an analogue in aesthetic theory to
the self-cancellation of anti-art noted by Bourdieu. 46 It represents on the analytic
level the same procedure as that by which the gallery and museum in folding the
44 P. Bourdieu, “The production of belief,” in The Field of Cultural Production, p. 136. Inconsistently,
Bourdieu asserted in a dialogue with Haacke that the latter proves “that a person, almost alone,
can produce immense effects by disrupting the game and destroying the rules, often through
scandal, the instrument par excellence of symbolic action” (Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke,
Free Exchange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 84). The “immense effect” under
discussion was an artists’ boycott of art events sponsored by the Philip Morris Corporation,
stimulated by a Haacke work, which eventually led the corporation to give some money for the
fight against AIDS. This is, of course, a nice thing for an artist to stimulate but the rules of art
have hardly been destroyed, nor the game disrupted.
45 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1977), pp. 178, 144.
46 Notably by Arthur Danto in “The artworld.” See Chapter 9 below.
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