Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
readymade within their embrace removed the sting of its challenge to earlier
conceptions of art. That is, it obscures the turning point in the history of the
modern practice of the fine arts signaled by the attempt to produce a radical disjuncture
of art and aesthetics.
This is why it would also be wrong to dismiss Warhol’s analysis too quickly as
an ironization of the complex relationship a poor boy from Pittsburgh had to the
world of glamour and financial success into which his very social and psychological
distance from art opened a path. Kant’s analysis of the judgment of taste
assumed a fundamental universality among human beings, here localized in the
“sensus communis,” which alone made comprehensible the demand for uniformity
of judgment that he took to be implied by claims of aesthetic quality. 47
Philosophers argued that the actual lack of unanimity revealed, for example, in
the German “reading debate” of the eighteenth century, 48 and in the vast outpouring
of literature in all European languages concerned with the nature and
standard of taste, would be overcome in the course of time through the aesthetic
education of the vulgar; their assurance seemed justified for a hundred-odd years
by the general acceptance of the taste of the educated classes as better, whatever
the actual preferences of people in any class. Yet the chasm between “high” and
“low” taste was never bridged; it seemed to Clement Greenberg in 1939 that the
domain of the low (“kitsch”) had so expanded that the high remained only on
the threatened margin.
His dire prediction of the fate of art under capitalism seemed to be proven correct
in the 1960s, when the authority of taste in the world of high art itself was
badly shaken by the market success of Pop art, which forced critics who had initially
condemned or even dismissed it to take it seriously and eventually to
appreciate it with all the resources of learned discrimination. This development
was not an anomaly; the critics whose power had earlier made them threatening
figures to Barnett Newman never recovered their authority. By the end of
the 1970s, their place as arbiters of artistic value was taken by a de facto alliance
of museum curators and the auction market. 49 In retrospect, the structural fit
47 See David Summers, “Why did Kant call taste a ‘common sense’?” in Paul Mattick (ed.),
Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), pp. 121–51.
48 See above, Chapter 3, p. 39f.
49 For the role of museum curators in the creation of artistic value, see R. Moulin, “The museum
and the marketplace,” pp. 31–62. For the rise in importance of the auction market after 1970,
see Diana Crane, The Transformation of the Avant-Garde: The New York Art World, 1941–1985
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 114 ff; Nancy Sullivan’s penetrating article,
“Inside trading: postmodernism and the social drama of Sunflowers in the 1980s art world,”
argues that the art community is defined sociologically “by its proximity to the auction market,
which is itself based in New York auction houses” (in George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers
(ed.), The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), p. 257). The crowning artistic monument to this development is perhaps Sol LeWitt’s
Wall Drawing #896—exemplifying a type of object art-historically celebrated as “dramatically
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