Keith Owens (2008) Turning toward the aesthetic, turning away from responsibility (Chapter 3: pp. 28-40). In, Palmer, C. and Torevell, D. (Eds.) The turn to aesthetics. Liverpool Hope University Press, UK. (original) (raw)

Art and social critic Hal Foster (2002) once suggested that much cultural autonomy — Kraus’s (1912) ‘running room’ (Spielraum) — has collapsed into a world where “everything from jeans to genes seems to be regarded as so much design” (17). For Foster, this ‘total design’ has co-opted the semi-autonomy of art and architecture and placed society in a narcissistic loop of hybrid aestheticism from which its members cannot escape. In this sense, Foster suggests art and life have finally connected but “according to the spectacular dictates of the culture industry, not [by] the libratory ambitions of the avant-garde” (19). Foster traces this conflation to it roots in Art Nouveau’s pledge to Gesamtkunstwerk or ‘total work’ and the Bauhaus’si attempts to mediate modernity by transplanting aesthetic concepts about beauty, through fitness of form, into mass produced objects. These two instances of aesthetic and utilitarian conflation are unique, however, only insofar as they occurred within the burgeoning market-driven juggernaut remaking society in the late 19th and early 20th Century. Throughout history, for good or ill, in large and small ways, fine and applied artists have been called upon to turn their aesthetic endeavors towards larger social ends, the primary variable being the cultural milieu, ideology, or political force pressing them into service (Carroll, 1998) — art endowed with moral content (Armstrong, 2003) or propaganda valorizing state imperatives (Devereaux, 1998), for example.