Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
Criticism are as irrelevant to contemporary art today as when Newman complained
about philosophical detachment from the art world struggle over
aesthetic legitimacy and significance) is itself a symptom of the ongoing transformation
of the practice of art signaled by the rise of the anti-aesthetic. Art, once
securely positioned as the highest secular religion of modern society—higher
than science, for all practical purposes, because it is both more accessible to the
nonspecialist and freer of the taint of commercial (not to mention military) utility—has
now become an area of confusion and contestation. The taking up of
this field of production and consumption, and in particular of the avant-garde
area within it, by institutions of state and academy, together with the enormous
and rapid expansion of the market for art, have done much to erode the earlier
conception of art as founded on the transcendence of social particularity
achieved by the heroic, creative individual.
At the same time, the importance of the role of the practice of art in the
development of modern society, visible in the use of the museum and concert
hall as reliquaries for the material embodiments of its “higher self,” means that it
remains with us despite the ever more apparent incoherence of its conceptual
structure. As a result of this practice’s continuing life, even attempts to question
basic elements of aesthetic ideology can function in the struggle for art world
legitimacy and commercial success. For example, the success of “postmodern”
critics and artists in defining “feminist art” in terms of the use of non-traditional
media has made possible the creation of an artistic (and marketing) niche for
critical women’s work, while also largely accepting as a given the centuries-old
definition of painting—still the core (and highest priced) commodity of the art
business—as masculine, despite the activity of women and feminist painters. 53
Here too we see that the refusal of aesthetics is no more a guarantee of actual
transformation of the social significance of art than the autonomy of form once
seemed to some to be.
53 One can get a sense of the breadth of women’s artistic activity in the 1970s and 1980s, and the
constrictive force of the play of positions exercised within the artistic field, from the accounts of
artists’ panels, and reactions to them, in Judy Seigel (ed.), Mutiny and the Mainstream.
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