I've started reading online The new aestheticism (Manchester University Press) edited by John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas. Here are some notes I've made from the introduction.

The image of cultural conservatism can be identified as the old-style academic aesthete sitting in his (and it was always his) ivory tower and handing down judgements about the good and the bad in art and culture with a blissful disregard for the politics of his pronouncements. The old style aestheticism assumes that art is a ‘privileged realm’ which exists at a non-cognitive remove beyond history, and it works with categories such as aesthetic independence, artistic genius, the cultural and historical universality of a text or work, and the humanist assumption of art’s intrinsic spiritual value.

This position has been subject to criticism that shows art's contamination by politics and culture. Art is inextricably tied to the politics of contemporary culture, and has been throughout modernity. Despite the mass media's bemoaning the decline of traditional values, it is difficult to argue that aesthetics is anything other than thoroughly imbricated with politics and culture; or to argue for any sort of rearguard defence of, or case for a return to, the notion of art as a universally and apolitically humanist activity presided over by a benign council of critical patriarchs.

What has emerged to replace the complacency of the old-style aestheticism anti-aestheticism of recent cultural theory that dispenses with traditional aesthetic categories, thereby foreclosing on the possibility of a more rigorous engagement with the historical processes by which such categories continue to be ‘critiqued and renewed’ in the light of art's contamination by politics and culture.

The starting point here is that the aesthetic has remained irreducible within modernity, and thus has appeared in a range of different guises always as a ‘surplus’ (an autonomous art) to the organising drive of instrumental reason.