Rick over at Artrift has posted the third section of his interview with Derek Allan from the ANU.

This section discusses the reason for the discipline of aesthetics not taking up Malraux's ideas on the historicity of the western understanding of art and the revolutionary shift in our understanding of art. Derek says that:

"The discipline of aesthetics has a fairly long history now and has tended, I think, to leave a deposit of familiar ideas that have in certain cases hardened into something like dogmas. Ideas like, for example: that art must necessarily have something to do with beauty, or that art is in some way a �representation� of reality, or that the artist �sees the world� more perceptively than the rest of us, or that he/she is necessarily �more sensitive� than the rest of us, or that the artist �expresses� himself in his work, or that works of art �reflect� the historical period in which they are created, or that a work of art is the product of various artistic or psychological �influences�, or that the history of art is in some way a series of �advances�, or that art as we understand the idea is a human constant, common to all cultures at all times."

This list captures a lot of the key ideas of aesthetics---or what is left of it---and includes many of the habitual, or taken-for-granted ways that those in the art institution regard art, artists and the creation of art works. These contradictory ideas which we use to think about art form the sedimented common sense of the art institution. Yet there is little critical reflection upon them. Hence the need for philosophical aesthetics.

In large part the commonsense ideas indicate a problem in aesthetics, or the way we currently think about art, the way it changes and mutates. If we take what Malrauz says is true (ie., the inclusion of non-western cultural objects into art), then aesthetics has fallen behind art. Aesthetics lags behind art and this is why it is widely distrusted. In lagging behind it acts to cover up what is happening to art works and so it fails to understand artworks today. Aesthetics becomes traditional and it ends up in a prescriptive role to art imposing alien concepts or norms on art.

Hence there is a need for critical self-reflection on the works of art in the art institution. It is the only hope that aesthetics has to survive. It is what Malraux invites us to do: moving beyond commentary on specific works of art that take the concepts for granted to thinking about the concepts. A modern, as opposed, to a traditional aesthetics, should dissolve the conventional aesthetic categories.

The above commentary is limited. It is less exploring the ideas than bringing Adorno's Aesthetic Theory into a dialogue with Malraux and Allen. Why do this? Because Adorno's aesthetics unmasks the pretence of traditional aesthetics that its aesthetic norms are eternal and immutable; develops a complex model of the social mediation of art; and argues for the social significance of autonomous art.