Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
between the incessant innovation of avant-gardism and the repetition of novelty
required for a lively speculative market was bound over time to undermine the
claim to disinterest that Kant had made definitional of the aesthetic. 50
As Paul Ardenne observes, the institutional basis for this was laid by the
nineteenth-century achievement of “the real or supposed autonomy of art relative
to society,” which “created an aesthetic sphere unto itself, an absolute and
solipsistic universe of value.” The Renaissance system that priced work in relation
to its material constituents as well as the design agreed upon by patron and
maker had a residue in the Parisian system of pricing by picture sizes (“points”)
still in place in the earlier twentieth century. But the autonomy of the aesthetic,
as the conceptualization of the modern emergence of “art” as a distinct field of
social practice, made the anti-aesthetic possible, by underwriting the twentiethcentury
tendency for the artwork to evolve from an object with particular
perceptual and referential properties toward an object whose social and economic
value was increasingly determined by its character as art. 51 Thus (in
Ardenne’s words) the readymade, “of little inherent material value, acquired
value only by virtue of the credit bestowed upon it (or not) by the source of legitimation,”
the artistic field. Anti-aesthetics is the theoretical counterpart to a
contemporary art system in which high prices “are the best indication” that the
works that bear them “do indeed belong to the sphere of art.” 52
The present-day conservatism of philosophical aesthetics (the articles in a
publication like the American Society for Aesthetics’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art
challenging traditional thinking about the art object and its place in the world,” in particular
making “art available to a broader public”—made for the lobby of Christie’s auction house in
the Rockefeller Center, New York in 1999 (John S. Weber, “Sol LeWitt: the idea, the wall drawing,
and public space,” in Gary Garrels (ed.), Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), p. 89).
50 In her 1967 survey of the French art market, Raymonde Moulin had already suggested that
“characterized, in its most advanced tendencies, by a continual questioning of accepted values
and by an accelerated series of changes, art by its very nature offers an incitation to the speculative
behavior that is one of the dominant traits of the post-war market” (Le Marché de la peinture en
France (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), p. 69).
51 In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that “the purposelessness
of the great modern work of art depends on the anonymity of the market. Its
demands pass through so many intermediaries that the artist is exempt from any definite
requirements—though admittedly only to a certain degree.” Even so, they asserted prophetically,
a change in the character of the art commodity is coming about. What is new is not
that it is a commodity, but that today it deliberately admits that it is one; that art
renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods
constitutes the charm of novelty.
Tr. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 157
52 Paul Ardenne, “The art market in the 1980s,” International Journal of Political Economy 25:2
(Summer 1995), pp. 111–3.
132