Aesthetics After Modernism

Abstract

Aesthetics after Modernism argues for the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to art after modernism. The author shows that even what are typically taken to be the hardest of hard cases engage us in recognisably aesthetic ways and so remain amenable to aesthetic analysis. The book traces the artworld’s rejection of aesthetic theory to Clement Greenberg’s success in co-opting the discourse of aesthetics, notably Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, to underwrite his own formalism about modernist art. Not only has this led to Kant being tarred with the brush of Greenbergian formalism; it has also led critics and theorists of later art to miss the resources of the aesthetic tradition, perhaps especially Kant, for capturing what is distinctive about our cognitive relation to the kinds of art that most interest them. There is a tendency to assume that Kant’s aesthetics cannot speak to the more conceptual aspects of our interactions with art. The author traces the legacy of Greenberg’s modernism and formalism for later art criticism and theory, before offering an interpretation of Kant’s theory of art that seeks to show otherwise. The book takes Conceptual Art as a test case: here is a form of art that often claims to forgo sensible properties altogether. But if Kant’s aesthetics can accommodate our cognitive relation to art with no sensible features relevant to its appreciation as art, then it should in principle withstand the challenge of any form of art.