A 2007 issue of Filozofski Vestnik, an online open access journal of philosophy with an interdisciplinary character, was concerned with aesthetics. For many aesthetics is generally considered to be a discipline that is outdated, conservative, too formalist, and devoid of contact with real life. If the task of aesthetics is to reflect art, then aesthetics currently lives under the sign of uselessness.

Ernest Ženko in Mode-2 Aesthetics points out that:

When art lost its connection with the beautiful during the first decades of the twentieth century, there were considerable efforts among aestheticians to replace the beautiful as a key concept in grasping the essence of art and aesthetics with some other comparable notion. Unfortunately the results were not satisfactory; sublime, form, expression, creativity, and other concepts have never achieved the importance of the beautiful. nonetheless, a Kantian logic that related the beautiful to “an entirely disinterested satisfaction,” survived in the autonomy of art, which was the essential condition of modernism in the arts, as well as of cultural modernity in general.

Both art and culture have gradually lost their autonomy, due to commodification, and aesthetics looks decidedly traditional and outmoded. Outmoded in the sense that art is not essentially about beauty nor was the production of beauty the core purpose of art. We can, however, talk about artistic excellence which is not the same thing as aesthetic beauty.

So we need to disjoin art and beauty and allow beauty to be the idol of the marketplace---in fashion, advertising, everyday life and in the media. Why should celebrate an idol of the marketplace? Isn't art a realm of alterity? Shouldn't we link the arts and the experience of the arts to the rest of human experience? If so, then we would have an aesthetics based on the role of the arts in culture and history.