Rick over at Artrift has posted the second section of his interview with Derek Allan from the ANU. In it Allen addresses Malraux's argument that a fundamental change took place in how we in the West understood aesthetics.
Derek says that the reason:
"....Malraux focuses so strongly on specific works of art is that he wants to draw our attention to the enormous change that has taken place over the last century in what we – the West – include under the rubric art. We take it for granted now that art includes objects such as (certain) African masks, Indian bodhisattvas, or Mesoamerican figurines. But this was certainly not taken for granted in 1900, Malraux reminds us."
This is is important. What is being described here is the way Australians have changed their attitude to the cultural products of indigenous peoples. Once there were just artifacts from a dying civilization at a time when our art galleries were filled with portraits of dead white people from Europe (England).
After the 1970s the cultural products of indigenous poeple are deemed to some of the most innovative art works being produced in Australia. The acrylic desert paintings have been interpreted as helping to define contemporary Australian art. So when Malrauz tralks about 1900 in a European context we need to redescribe this aesthetic shift as the 1970's in the Australian context.
Could this shift be a change in taste? Allen says no:
"What happened was not comparable to a shift in ‘taste’ from, for example, Baroque to Romantic (assuming that the notion of taste could explain even that). For the first time in human history, Malraux points out, one culture began to admire the works of all other cultures. Malraux calls it an ‘aesthetic revolution’ and argues – with good reason in my view – that it signified a fundamental shift in the very notion of art, and in how we respond to art."
I reckon this is right. Art in itself has gone. We now think of art in its historical context. And this has import for aesthetics as a discipline. As Derek says:
"Personally, I don’t think one can approach the philosophy of art sensibly today without taking that development into account and trying to understand its significance."
Alas, the discipline of aesthetics, in general, suffers from a lack of historical perspective. This does not seem to matter since aesthetics is marginal not only in the sense that it lies at the edge, or border, of the philosophy discipline, but also in the additional, more troubling, sense that it is deemed to be philosophically unimportant. As Adorno put it in Aesthetic Theory:
"Like the idea of a philosophical system or a philosophy of morals, the notion of a philosophical aesthetics seems awfully antiquated. This perception is not confined to artists and public opinion, both of which are indifferent to aesthetic theory. It is a sentiment one runs into even amongst university students." (pp. 456-457).
Aesthetics seems obsolescent and it is mistrusted.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 4, 2003 04:47 PM | TrackBack