Global Aesthetics and Its Discontents (original) (raw)
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Aesthetics and the political turn in art
2015
It was observed as early as the mid-twentieth century that aesthetics as a philosophical theory of art differs from its objects. The products of contemporary artistic practice go beyond the horizon of traditional aesthetics. Artists are involved increasingly often and on a wide scale in the actions aimed at transforming and constructing the common space. In the face of such activities as took place, for example, as part of the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2012, traditional aesthetics seems to be helpless. That is why, if art is to continue to be the focus of aesthetic investigations, it must, as it were, redefine itself. Jacques Rancière is one of the authors who have outlined the new horizon of aesthetics. In my paper I will briefly present his conception. It provides some theoretical tools which I will use for the description and interpretation of some selected examples of contemporary socially engaged artistic practices. I will show that his distinction of the „aes...
SAJ, 2019
The subject of my paper is the dynamic and transformational relations between aesthetics and art from 1919 to 2019. The first problem to be discussed will be the relationship between art and politics at the Bauhaus and art institutes of the Soviet avant-garde. Next, I will point to differences in Marxist concepts of socialist realism and critical theory on modern culture and art. I will analyse the relationship between the concept of the autonomy of art, especially painting and minimal art. A comparison will be derived between anti-art (Dada, Neo-Dada) and anti-philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan). I will highlight approaches from analytical meta-aesthetics to the interpretation of Duchamp's readymade, deriving a theory of art in conceptual art. Special attention will be paid to the "theoretical conflicts" between phenomenology and structuralism, as well as poststructuralism. I will conclude my discussion by identifying the "aesthetic condition" in relation to "contemporary art" (feminist, activist, political, ecological, participatory, and appropriative art). The aim of my discussion will be to highlight the character of modern and contemporary aesthetics in relation to art theory, by way of diagrammatic reflection on the binaries, differences, and reconstructions of dialectics.
?Revolutionary? art and the ?art? of revolution: Aesthetic work in a millenarian period
Theory and Society, 1976
Art as Revolutionary Practice: Worldly Aestheticism The anarchist orientation and antinomian life style characteristic of the counter-culture I has been endemic to the twentieth century avant-garde. Modernist art might even be regarded as an enclave in which anarchism has been kept "on ice" and given symbolic expression during periods in which it lay dormant politically. If past generations of artists looked upon revolutionary activity with admiration as the "fine art of the proletariat, ''2 an isomorphism in the expression of political and aesthetic revolt also encouraged aspiring revolutionaries of the sixties to look for inspiration to the avantgarde tradition in the arts. Herbert Marcuse, the most influential of the theorists to explicate the counter-culture to other intellectuals and to itself, argued in a gnostic vein that Art housed an exiled divine spark-the image of human liberation and the sublimation of human rebellion-which, breaking its bounds, could inspire the most radical transformation of life ever achieved. In this philosophy, Art, by offering a prototypical model of the reconciliation of sensuousness and rationality, freedom and form, points the way to a liberating and humanizing rather than alienating and deforming social organization. If Art thus becomes the magically mediating key to a series of cognitive oppositions of central moral significance, aesthetic experience, by implication, is a form of critical consciousness more profound than any narrowly political leftism, and the artist, an avatar of a new social order. The artist's work need not even be manifestly politically "engaged" for this to be the case; in fact, the less addressed to pressing "issues of the day" and the more single-minded its pursuit of purely aesthetic problems, the more profound its radicalism is
Understanding the Work of Aesthetics in Modern Life
Proceedings of the 30th International Academic Conference, Venice, 2017
NeoMarxists scholars of education writing on urban life have tended to place aesthetics on the boundaries of critical practices, treating aesthetics as a surplus set of practices that could only be made fully usefully relevant when added on to a more concentrated attention to economy and politics. The main claim I want to make in this presentation is that aesthetic practices now underwrite the fibre of everyday modern life. As Arjun Appadurai usefully argues in Modernity at Large and History as Cultural Fact aesthetics are no longer to be simply understood as the practices of the artist, a maverick citizen creating images about the past, present and the future of human existence. But aesthetics are linked to the work of imagination of ordinary people and connected even more earnestly to the work of capitalism and its reorganization on a global scale. Contrary to the neoMarxist tradition, aesthetic practices are at the epicenter of lived experience and the commodified and institutional practices of modern societies. These practices, as CLR James allerted us to in American Civilization, constitute a great window on contemporary life revealing central contradictions, tensions and discontinuities. This, after all, was the burden of the Latin American and Caribbean Writers Forum of Intellectual and Cultural workers (George Lamming, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others) who had publicly opposed the Reagan government invasion of Grenada in 1983. They insisted, as did Arnaldo Roche-Rabel, that aesthetics were imbricated in economy and politics-that artistic militancy is critical to production of democracy. The work of aesthetics is crucial to any formula for democratic transformation. In this presentation, I would like to call attention to the following issues. First, the entanglement of the diffusion of modernization to the third world in aesthetics. Second, I want to point as well to the deepening role of aesthetics in the organization capitalism in the new millenium in which we live. Third, I will discuss briefly the crisis of language that the aestheticization of everyday life has imposed/precipitated in neoMarxist efforts to grasp the central dynamics of comtemporary society. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neoMarxist analysis in our time-old metaphors associated with the class, economy, state ("production," "reproduction," "resistance," "the labor/capital" contradiction) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale.
SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, 2018
Within critical theory and beyond, many of the debates about the status of art turn, explicitly or implicitly, upon the concept of participation. Avant-garde movements of the 20th century linked themselves to emancipatory political movements through practices and rhetorics of mass participation, opening art to new audiences, lowering the barriers to participation for creators, and sometimes eliminating the distinction between makers and audiences altogether. Though the debates between Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, György Lùkacs, Bertolt Brecht and others are often discussed through concepts such as autonomy, totality, and mimesis, this chapter argues that we might usefully reorganize our understanding of such debates by thinking through the links between aesthetic and political participation. Articulated in this manner, continuities between critical theory and later theorizations – such as those of the Situationist International – become visible. Finally, this chapter will consider the potent critiques of participation as an aesthetic and political ideology as well as the impasses that participatory theory and practice encounters over the course of the twentieth century. These impasses, it will be argued, are especially prominent within the social movements and cultural practices of the new century.