This is courtesy of wood s lot. It is a break or rupture from the standard way of thinking about aesthetics.
By and large Anglo-American aesthetics treats art and the human response to art as if they were intrinsic, permanent aspects of human life. It is certainly what I learned when I studied visual arts to balance philosophy) at the liberal university----just before discipline was wiped out by the cultural revolutionaries who saw the university as a corporation.
This timeless view of art is what Malraux challenges. His argument represents a radical departure from the tradition of Western aesthetics since its beginnings in the eighteenth century. It is a fundamental challenge to that aesthetic tradition because it historicises art.
The essay is by Derek Allan who is at the ANU. The paper can be found here
The key points in Malraux's argument are:
1. thinking about art begins with the objects that are in the art musem and not abstract philosophical definitions. This gives us the range of particular objects that contemporary Western culture considers to be art.
2. there has been enormous change in the range of these objects over
time (since 1900) to include objects from non-Western cultures such as, statues from Egyptian tombs, Mesoamerican figurines, or ceremonial masks from Africa and Oceania. Yet objects from non-Western cultures
3. What had once been seen simply as fetishes, idols, or curios - never as art--now became art. A good example are the objects of Australia's indigenous people.
4. This signified a new way of seeing involvinga radical break with what had gone before:- ‘une révolution esthétique’ that brought about a profound change in the very meaning of the term art and the experience it denotes.
5. The non-western objects of indigenous culture are not sacred for us; we do not place them in tombs, nor regard them as objects of reverence or as offerings for the gods. The ends they serve for us are those of something called ‘art’, and, in our eyes, belong in our art museums.
6. the art musem estranges the work/object from its orginal function -and this process is somethnng we take for granted. We see these objects as they are enframed by the art musem as ‘sculptures’, ‘pictures’ and ‘statues’.
7.Malraux’s rejects notions such as universal artistic ‘practices’ and timeless forms which say that these objects are ‘essentially art works' from the very beginning and that no essential transformation has taken place.
8.If art is time-bound - as subject to change and potential consignment to oblivion --then our aesthetic response has emerged at a specific point in time, and is susceptible to change. - The specificity, and ultimately the contingency, of the experience we name the experience of ‘art’ is distinctively ours and not something that we can, or even need to, see as deriving in some way from the ‘true nature’ or ‘essential purposes’ of the objects concerned.
9.The meaning of the word art in western civilization has changed throughout history. Art's various meanings were all crucially different from the meaning it has now assumed. Malraux argues that the closing years of the nineteenth century ushered in an ‘aesthetic revolution’.
The notion of art now, Malraux is arguing defines us as much as we define it, because it identifies a form of human response specific to us – specific to modern Western culture since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 30, 2003 12:28 PM | TrackBack