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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

the anti-aesthetic stance « Previous | |Next »
August 7, 2012

I've never really understood what the anti-aesthetic stance that has been a current in the art world since the 1960s stance stood for. That current appears quite strong in postmodernist criticisms of formalist modernism. Postmodernism was created as the antithesis to modernist emphasis in aesthetics. From what I can gather he anti-aesthetic stance rejects the aesthetic because it is either invites irrational sensuous indulgence, or it embodies elitist class-biased standards of taste, which are ideologically complicit with instrumental reason.

Howere, if we dig a little deeper, then those who adopt the 'anti-aesthetic stance' appear to mean different things, such as:

(1) pertaining to art, (2) pertaining to the sensuous and affective aspects of experience, (3) pertaining to pictorial representations, images, or icons, (4) pertaining to the philosophical discipline of aesthetics, (5) pertaining to norms or standards for the evaluation or critique of artworks or other images, (6) pertaining to beauty, (7) pertaining to the autonomy of art.

Key texts are Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic, Tony Bennett’s Outside Literature, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, and Hal Foster’s anthology, The Anti-Aesthetic.

Proponents of ‘the anti-aesthetic’ have sought to undermine aesthetics by casting it as an excrescence parasitic on art itself; moreover, aesthetics has, on such readings, been taken as an obfuscation of the politics of art and thus a direct competitor with politicizing readings of artworks: where aesthetics, so it is held, maintains the credo of ‘art for art's sake’, the anti-aesthetic clears a space for the possibility of a politically engaged art.

Owens' oppositional postmodernism takes issue with a Kantian understanding of the aesthetic, which is understood in terms of:

the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without "purpose," all but beyond history, or that art can now effect a world at once (inter)subjective, concrete and universal a symbolic totality....."anti-aesthetic" marks a cultural position on the present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid?(For example, is the model of subjective taste not threatened by mass mediation, or that of universal vision by the rise of other cultures?) What is hard to that is hard to relinquish: the notion of the aesthetic as subversive, a critical interstice in an otherwise instrumental world--as held by Adorno. Now, however, we have to consider that this aesthetic space too is eclipsed or rather, that its criticality is now largely illusory (and so instrumental).

It was a strong current of the 1980s

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:17 PM |