Professional Writing Service http://StudyHub.vip/Aesthetics-And-Contemporary-Art

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6. Why associate aesthetics and contemporary art? Framing an
answer to this question depends on addressing both terms.
Given the ageing of postmodernism as a critical category, but
also the absence of any plausible replacement for it, the con-
temporary has become the default cultural periodization for
the artistically current. It is, however, notoriously difficult to
specify the contemporaneity of contemporary art. Never-
theless, notwithstanding reservations about its suitability,
‘contemporary’ art has been taken on as the generic name for
the post-postmodern art that began to emerge in the 1990s
but that is only now receiving the serious and sustained the-
oretical attention that it demands if it is to be taken as a
critical, rather than merely a journalistic or curatorial,
category.1
But can ‘aesthetics’ be of any use to us here? Isn’t it
the case that the ontological grounds of art after modernism
– an art after Minimalism and Conceptual Art – consists,
following Hal Foster, in being ‘anti-aesthetic’, renouncing the
conjunction of aesthetics and art, dispensing with
Greenberg’s late insistence that ‘art and the esthetic don’t
just overlap, they coincide’?2
The beginnings of an answer might be outlined by
pointing to the fact that a conjunction of art and aesthetics
does not imply a coincidence and, moreover, never did. Kant
argued that if an aesthetic judgement were to be qualified
by the concept ‘art’ it would become a logically conditioned
judgement and thus no longer purely aesthetic. Hegel
famously pointed out the inadequacy of the term ‘aesthetics’
for a discourse on art.3
Thus we need not wait for Judd
to declare that a work of art ‘needs only to be interesting’
in order to recognize that aesthetics and art do not sit in
harmonious relation.4
Following Adorno, we can observe
that ‘art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically
misperceived.’5
However, it is a mistake simply to invert
formalist modernism’s error and to oppose an intransigent
anti-aestheticism to aestheticism. Taking such a strategy
– one that can plausibly be associated with the discourse of

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!
(critical) postmodernism as it developed in the visual arts
– unwittingly confirms formalist modernism’s error while
mistakenly believing it has overcome it.6
The aim of this book, then, is to investigate what
aesthetics and art might have to do with each other in the
contemporary moment, to interrogate the character of
their conjunction. Doing so, however, means more than
reconsidering the relation between two fields. Rather, as the
assembled articles demonstrate, it also implies rethinking the
changing historical character of both ‘aesthetics’ and ‘art’ as
well as, concomitantly, the changing historical character of
their relation. Grasping the contemporary conjuncture of art
and aesthetics is necessarily a historical task.
Such a task is of course already under way. Torn between
a revival of aesthetics and the persistence of conceptualism,
critical writing about contemporary art has come to focus
on differing views of its aesthetic dimension. The context
and character of these debates have shifted markedly
since the 1960s, with changes in art practices, institutions,
political contexts, theoretical paradigms and, in particular,
with the global extension of the Western art world since
1989. The public sphere on which both avant-gardist and
neo-avant-gardist critiques depended no longer exists in
a recognizable form. Artists, even when they are making
painting and sculpture again, do so from the perspective
of the collapse of medium specificity as a legitimating dis-
course. Significant contemporary art accepts the dissolution
of artistic limits, acknowledging the challenges involved in so
doing. Museums and galleries have long since incorporated
art in the ‘expanded field’, such that it is the art institution,
rather than any ontological criteria specific to the artwork
itself, that now seems to ratify art’s status as such.7
Art no
longer sequesters itself from (the politics of) everyday life,
or even from the domain of direct practical use, and on the
contrary frequently defines itself by intervening, such that
instrumentalization, rather than aestheticization, presents

8. 7B@=2C1B7=
itself as the more significant risk for contemporary practices
(as demonstrated by the controversies, already academicized,
surrounding Relational Aesthetics).8
Recently, then, after a long period of hostility to aesthet-
ics prompted by a mistaken belief in its complicity with
‘spectacle’ and the commercial aestheticization of everyday
life, or, more locally, the conservative formulae of reactionary
postmodernism, art discourse has reopened to aesthetic
considerations. Many anglophone art historians and critics
have refocused their attention towards aesthetic aspects of
‘theory’ with Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic regime and Alain
Badiou’s inaesthetics arguably constituting something like
opposed poles here.9
(This is perhaps not before time given
that ‘Continental philosophy’ since Kant has been character-
ized by the centrality of aesthetics to its particular mode of
questioning.)
The (re)turn to philosophical aesthetics has prompted
several recent edited anthologies of critical work. To name
and briefly discuss a representative selection: Peter Osborne’s
From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses
(2000) acknowledged that contemporary art stands on the
ruins of beauty and sought to reconsider the relevance of
the aesthetic, thought as the constitutive excess that marks
art off from other forms of intellectual production; Michael
Ann Holly and Keith Moxey’s Art History, Aesthetics, Visual
Studies (2002) examined the dominant aesthetic assumptions
that underlie art historical enquiry, enquiring as to whether
these assumptions have stood up to the challenge posed to
them not only by recent developments in aesthetics but also
in visual studies; James Elkins’s Art History versus Aesthetics
(2006) staged a confrontation between disciplines by bringing
ten aestheticians and ten art historians into a roundtable
and publishing the results of their extended debate; Francis
Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor’s Rediscovering
Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy
and Art Practice (2009), in contrast, engaged the overlap

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#
between artistic and academic fields, enquiring after the
current role of aesthetics within and across them.
This volume also emerges from a transdisciplinary
encounter, featuring contributions from philosophers, art
historians and artists, all of whom work against narrow dis-
ciplinary specialization. The majority of the essays originate
in talks given on the occasion of an international conference
on ‘Aesthetics and Contemporary Art’ held in London (13–14
March 2008). The conference was organized as a collabora-
tion between two academic institutions: the Centre for
Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), then
at Middlesex University, now moved to Kingston University
London; and the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Aesthetic
Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits’ (SFB 626)
at the Free University Berlin. It was supported by a grant
from the British Academy. The character of this volume
stems from the nature of the two institutions and the tone
of their collaboration. The SFB 626 is a research centre that
brings together a group of scholars from different disciplines,
including art history, film studies, comparative literature
and philosophy. As a whole, it is devoted to exploring the
tripartite question of (i) whether and to what degree it is
possible to speak of the singular nature of aesthetic experience;
(ii) whether forms of aesthetic experience exist that are
specific to the artistic realm; (iii) whether forms of aesthetic
experience exist that are specific to the individual arts. The
CRMEP is the leading centre for postgraduate-level study and
doctoral research in Continental philosophy in the UK. Its
philosophically informed approach to contemporary art sits
within a broader commitment to the field of post-Kantian
European philosophy, a position further characterized by a
strong emphasis on broad cultural and intellectual contexts
and a distinctive sense of social and political engagement.
Contributors then based at the CRMEP and included in this
book are Peter Osborne, Éric Alliez, Stewart Martin and
Luke Skrebowski; contributors then based at the SFB 626

10. 7B@=2C1B7=
$
are Christoph Menke, Juliane Rebentisch, Dorothea von
Hantelmann and Armen Avanessian. In addition, this volume
includes articles from Sebastian Egenhofer (University of
Basel), John Rajchman (Columbia University), Pamela M. Lee
(Stanford University), Brian Holmes (independent critic), and
the artists Luis Camnitzer and Art Language. All of the
participants share a common interest in the relation between
aesthetics and contemporary art, while approaching this
issue from different angles.
The intention of this volume is to investigate contempo-
rary questions by acknowledging the entire sweep of the his-
torical emplotment of art and aesthetics, from the eighteenth
century through to the twenty-first. In so doing the aim is
not only to consider the ongoing relevance of the aesthetic
tradition but also to contribute to the development of that
tradition as it evolves, not always in parallel, with the histori-
cal development of art. Such a strategy is recommended by
the fact that the notion of the aesthetic, which had for many
years been utterly dismissed, has returned in unforeseen
ways. Consequently, this collection reconsiders the place of
the aesthetic in contemporary art, with reference to several
orienting themes: aesthetics understood as ‘sensate thinking’;
the dissolution of artistic limits attendant upon art’s post-
medium condition; the status of post-autonomous artistic
practices; the question of exhibition-value; the aesthetics of
curation in a global artworld. The organization of the volume
follows a simple schema: starting with more general aesthetic
problems it moves on to quite specific reflections on the aes-
thetics of particular curatorial regimes or artistic practices.
In the first essay of the collection a connection can be
traced between the origins of the discipline of aesthetics
in the late eighteenth century and the present. Christoph
Menke’s ‘Not Yet. The Philosophical Significance of
Aesthetics’ investigates the paradoxical place of aesthetics
within philosophy in general, distinguishing a ‘philosophy of
poetics’ (the origins of which can be found in Aristotle) from

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%
‘aesthetics’ in order to show how modern philosophy origi-
nates with the emergence of the latter. He demonstrates that
it is not only the question of aesthetics’ relation to art that
needs to be considered but also whether aesthetics can be
thought as ‘proper’ to philosophy or, on the contrary, whether
it puts philosophy itself into question. As such, Menke’s text
sets out a fundamental problematic inflecting the relation
between philosophy, aesthetics and (contemporary) art.
Focusing exclusively on the time frame of modernity, in
‘Aesthetics of Form Revisited’ Armen Avanessian investigates
the two constitutive fields of knowledge of the discipline
of aesthetics: theories of the production of the various
arts on the one hand, and theories of their perception and
reception on the other. Rereading the modern history of the
complex notion of ‘form’, he discusses the specific interrela-
tion of both fields within modernity, up to and including
contemporary artistic practice and theory. Concepts such
as Documenta XII’s ‘migration of form’ demonstrate that
problems attending the theorization of form which origi-
nated at the beginning of modernity are still active today.
The requirement to combine the theorization of art works
with the theorization of their reception is also at stake in the
essay by Juliane Rebentisch, ‘7 Negations. Against Aesthetic
Affirmationism’. Against reductive modernist aesthetics,
which she reproaches Alain Badiou for attempting to resus-
citate, Rebentisch develops an alternative account of artistic
autonomy as occurring between (art) object and (empirical)
subject, deploying a renewed understanding of ‘aesthetic
experience’ informed by the transgression of the conventions
that govern the identity of the traditional art mediums and
genres.
Éric Alliez, in his ‘Undoing the Image (Signposts of a
Research Programme)’, investigates the way in which modern
art and the modern idea of art have problematized images,
leading to a crisis in the very notion of the image and
with it the ‘aesthetic’ identity of art. For Alliez this crisis is

12. 7B@=2C1B7=
constitutive of modern art from Manet onwards but finds its
strongest expression in the radical break with the aesthetic
image effected by both Duchamp and Matisse (albeit in
radically different ways). This break, he argues, constitutes
contemporary art, relaunching a conflict around the question
of the sensible, the development of which he traces in the
work of Gordon Matta-Clark.
Making an alternative reading of the aesthetic character
of contemporary art, Sebastian Egenhofer, in his essay
‘Aesthetic Materiality in Conceptualism’, takes up questions
of materiality, not from a phenomenological perspective
but by going back to Kant via Duchamp and several classic
Minimalist and Conceptual artists. According to Egenhofer
these artists’ works set up aesthetic experience as the
location of a mediation between the sensual and the con-
ceptual, thereby destabilizing the opposition between the
two terms.
In ‘The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative
Collectivity and Transnationality in The Atlas Group’ Peter
Osborne addresses the issue of the contemporary as a
problem of the fictitious temporal and spatial unity of the
present. Arguing that ‘fictitiousness’ or ‘fictiveness’ is a condi-
tion of the representation of the contemporary, he draws
out the consequences of this condition for art. Osborne’s
essay develops this problem at two levels. First, he consid-
ers the historical ontology of the art work, understanding
contemporary art as distinctively post-conceptual. Second,
he examines the fictionalization of artistic authority and
the collectivization of artistic fictions in the work of Walid
Raad/The Atlas Group (1999–2005), developing a case study
in critical canon formation in contemporary art.
The inseparability of the question ‘what is contemporary?’
from the question ‘what is global?’ is at issue in the contribu-
tion by John Rajchman, ‘The Contemporary: A New Idea?’
Enquiring as to whether there is or could be a global art
history or philosophy, he tracks the development of contem-

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'
porary art, examining a series of historical ruptures: 1945,
1968, 1989. Rajchman claims that the broad, world-historical
development from ‘modern’ to ‘contemporary’ demands a
new global history of artistic and aesthetic changes. He
argues that this involves posing new questions at once inside
and outside Europe and America, in order to determine the
particular character of philosophical and artistic ‘actuality’
today.
Also departing from the historical horizon of 1989, Stewart
Martin, in his ‘Short Treatise on Art’, insists that in order to
ask fundamental questions about the character of contempo-
rary art we must also ask fundamental question about art’s
relation to capitalism. Acknowledging the daunting scale and
scope of such a project – for both philosophy and aesthetics
– Martin nevertheless insists that the magnitude of the
question must be acknowledged if we are to address its fun-
damental character. To this end he discusses art in relation
to a currently world-determining capitalism and its putative
opposite, namely communism.
Art Language present ‘Feeling Good: The Aesthetics of
Corporate Art’, a polemic against a contemporary art world
thoroughly dominated by corporate capital and in thrall
to the institutional theory of art. They reflect on the ways
in which art institutions do not seem to require a working
aesthetics of any kind since they are quite content with the
circularity involved in an institutional theory of art which,
although theoretically questionable, serves to legitimate their
expansion. Challenging the contemporary configuration
of the corporate art world while remaining sceptical about
‘post facto intellectualizing in the university’, Art Language
suggest an experiment in what they call a ‘practical aesthet-
ics’ of resistance.
In her essay ‘The Rise of the Exhibition and the Exhibition
as Art’ Dorothea von Hantelmann also sets out from the
contemporary configuration of the globalized art world. She
tracks the widespread adoption of the Western format of

14. 7B@=2C1B7=
the exhibition and links its success to the proliferation of
Western market ideology characterized by a linear notion
of time, the valorization of the individual and the centrality
of the production and commercial distribution of material
objects. For von Hantelmann, it is a specific format that is
now distributed globally, rather than a particular notion of
art. Tracing this development back to Minimalism’s situ-
ational turn, her thesis sets up a new ontological challenge
for aesthetics.
Revealing ‘The Invisible Hand of Curation’, Pamela M.
Lee focuses on one of the most successful developments of
the Western exhibition format, the biennial. She makes a
close critical reading of Robert Storr’s 52nd Venice Biennale
and its quasi-Schillerian injunction to ‘Think with the
Senses/Feel with the Mind’. Lee examines curatorial practice
as an aesthetics in it own right, critically interrogating the
way that Storr’s aestheticizing rhetoric served to mask the
ways in which his Venice Biennale participated in the broader
tendency of the contemporary biennial to naturalize the
imagery of contemporary geopolitics while neutralizing
the art world’s relation to the associated phenomena of
globalization.
Brian Holmes examines the ways in which the neutraliz-
ing tendencies Lee observes in the global biennial are also at
work in the gentrified urban landscape. In his contribution,
‘The Rules of the Game: Activist Art in the Creative City’
Holmes examines activist art projects – particularly Eva
and Franco Mattes’s Nikeground (2003) – that seek to refuse
the increasingly commodified forms of urban experience by
grounding a new form of autonomy, not of the artwork but
of the body politic. Nikeground, for Holmes, is an example
of ‘reverse imagineering’; that is, the deconstruction of
aestheticized control techniques and their reconfiguration
as emancipatory strategies engaging people in a direct and
transformative relation to the technical procedures that
modulate their experience of daily life.

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In the last essay of the volume Luis Camnitzer discusses
‘The Two Versions of Santa Anna’s Leg and Other Things’,
telling us tales recounting the destiny of the famous Mexican
general’s amputated left leg. He reads the fetishism sur-
rounding Santa Anna’s leg as an allegory of the history of art
and aesthetics alike. The surprising thesis of his contribution
is that postmodernism was born in December 1838 and
modernism followed a few years later in 1848. Camnitzer’s
contribution can be understood as a theoretical counterpart
to his artistic resistance against the Eurocentrism of the aes-
thetic tradition, and he concludes by critiquing the character
of Milan Kundera’s arguments in defence of a Weltliteratur,
opposing, by extension, a parallel conception of a Weltkunst
while holding open the possibility of a ‘good’ globalization.
The final contribution to this volume mirrors the first
in circling back to a specific set of historical problems that
are held to inflect the overarching relation between aesthet-
ics and art in the present. All of the contributors develop
original ways to interrogate the character of the conjunction
between these two fields and, in so doing, demonstrate the
ways in which their relation remains at stake and, moreover,
of signal importance as we attempt to specify what is at
stake in the ‘contemporary’.
For recent examples of attempts to theorize contemporary art, see Antinomies
of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Terry
Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee, Duke University Press, Durham
NC and London, 2008; Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009.
Clement Greenberg, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’, in Late Writings, ed. Robert C.
Morgan, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003, pp. 5–18, p. 13.
! ‘These lectures are devoted to Aesthetics. Their topic is the spacious realm of
the beautiful; more precisely, their province is art, or, rather, fine art. For this
topic, it is true, the word Aesthetics, taken literally, is not wholly satisfactory,
since “Aesthetics” means, more precisely, the science of sensation, of feeling.’
Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1975, p. 1.
Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’ (1965), in Complete Writings 1959–1975, The
Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
2005, pp. 181–9, p. 184.

16. 7B@=2C1B7=
# Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, University
of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 6.
$ On this issue, see Peter Osborne, ‘Aesthetic Autonomy and the Crisis of
Theory: Greenberg, Adorno and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Visual
Arts’, New Formations 9, Winter 1989, pp. 31–50; Caroline A. Jones, ‘Postmod-
ernism’s Greenberg’, in Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the
Bureaucratization of the Senses, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005,
pp. 347–86.
% For the original discussion of the expanded field, see Rosalind Krauss,
‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8, Spring 1979, pp. 30–44; for an
account of the recuperation of work in the expanded field by the museum,
see Miwon Kwon, ‘Unhinging of Site Specificity’, in One Place After Another:
Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, pp.
33–55.
For the beginnings of the academic reception of relational aesthetics, and its
attendant controversies, see Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics’, October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51–79; Walead Beshty, ‘Neo-Avant-
garde and Service Industry: Notes on the Brave New World of Relational
Aesthetics’, Texte zur Kunst 59, September 2005, www.textezurkunst.de/59/
neo-avantgarde-and-service-industry; Liam Gillick, ‘Contingent Factors: A
Response to Claire Bishop’s “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”’, October
115, Winter 2006, pp. 95–107.
' Rancière outlines these stakes himself; see Jacques Rancière, ‘Aesthetics,
Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics’, in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of
Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward, Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 218–31;
Jacques Rancière, ‘Alain Badiou’s Inaesthetics: the Torsions of Modernism’,
in Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 2009, pp. 63–87.