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October 13, 2009
Is aesthetics making a return through the backdoor in the form of the return of beauty in reaction to the 1980s theoretical turn to Marxism, semiotics and postmodernism?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, red rose, Adelaide parklands, 2009
That turn to theory in the 1980s (reading Art Forum and October in the art school?) was seen as an embrace of the anti aesthetic.This did not imply a negation of aesthetics as such. Rather, it was intended to refer to an aesthetics of opposition to modernism. It offered a critical account of both modernist art and formalist art-criticism.
In a postindustrial society, in which aesthetics has been reintegrated into economic production, and art has become little more than "commodity production, investment portfolio and entertainment, conventional aesthetics has remained conservative. It is concerned with the autonomous art object and beauty.
The anti-aesthetic can be seen as a form of critique of the general strain of aesthetics popularly known as “art for art’s sake,” and more specifically the brand of formalism practiced by the critic Clement Greenberg, derived in turn from the 18th century philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty. Beauty was considered charming, pleasurable, or ornamental. Beauty after all, remains the official ethos of the fashion world. However, beauty remained. Modernist design movements began by stripping away the purely ornamental aspects of their designs to lay bare the functional essentials. Their perception of beauty was found in grids, in unity, and in mathematical symmetry. There is real beauty in order.
Modernism uses the technique of art to draw attention to its status as art. Instead of seeing a picture as the things it depicts, the proper way to view a painting is as a painted surface. Simplicity, flatness, the denial of illusion and the importance of the picture plane as what is important to seeing a photography as a picture. To see a picture first “as a picture” is to see it formally and to hold that art is an end in itself and, secondly, that the aesthetic is an autonomous value.
While Greenberg insisted that his framework was merely descriptive rather than prescriptive, its teleology was inescapable: to the extent that it was modernist, each medium tended to divest itself of all traits or characteristics not “proper” to it (that is, not belonging to some other medium). In the case of painting (his preferred medium), its “proper” characteristics were flatness, (two-dimensional) shape, and “opticality.” Other traits formerly common to painting, such as narrative, three-dimensional illusionism, or even texture, were more “proper” to other media and therefore to be avoided in painting (or, at least, in “modernist” painting).
The “anti-aesthetic” and “postmodernist” critics objected to both a conception of art as an autonomous sphere of human activity, detached from material, social, and political concerns and to Greenberg's modernism. The turn back to aesthetics and beauty is a return to a broader, Kantian aesthetics of autonomy, rather than to Greenberg; and a turn back to the idealist conception of the work of art as spaceless and timeless, a conception famously embodied by the modernist “white cube” gallery space.
Thus Hilton Kramer employs a clear-cut either/or aesthetic equation: modernism good, postmodernism bad.Art, they believe, has become little more than "commodity production, investment portfolio and entertainment."
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A widely influential interpretation of Greenbergian principles was Michael Fried’s classic 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood.”
Fried attacked the then-burgeoning minimalist movement (which he referred to as “literalist”) for what he called the “objecthood” and “presence” of its works. These terms referred to the much-vaunted phenomenological aspect of minimalism, whereby the very simplicity of its objects replaced modernist sculpture’s articulations of internal parts with the relationships between the work and its surrounding environment.
According to Fried, this aspect of minimalism was “theatrical” because it called attention to the viewer’s experience of the work in a specific space, for a specific duration of time, thus replacing the idealist conception of the work of art as spaceless and timeless. Fried referred to this timeless quality as “presentness,” as opposed to the more phenomenological “presence.”