Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy by Hulatt Owen

Author:Hulatt, Owen [Hulatt, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441132307
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The word ‘autonomy’ does not appear here, but the marks of Bloom’s bête noir are evident. One of its centre-pieces is a scepticism towards the traditional veneration of ‘aesthetic masterpieces, which constitute the canon of artistic excellence in the West’. And although the authors do invoke a notion of aesthetic value, they tie it to a conception of ‘prevailing cultural conditions’ which sounds close enough to Bloom’s overdeterminations of race, class and gender. But despite being in these ways at dialectical loggerheads, both views share some striking structural similarities. Like Bloom, Holly, Moxey and Bryson say little about the specific arguments and identities of their opposition, beyond a broad reference to a ‘Kantian aesthetic’ and its general features. Also like Bloom, they believe that our culture is gripped by a fundamental disagreement about how to understand artistic values, and that it consists in a confrontation between two incommensurable perspectives. Although these writers don’t use the term ‘autonomy’ here, it seems clear that they would view claims about autonomy as corollaries of claims about ‘Kantian’ intrinsic transcultural aesthetic values (and vice versa).

Consider now two further specimens of recent meta-aesthetic argument, drawn from Art History Versus Aesthetics, a collection of conversations among distinguished art historians and philosophers of art, organized around the following question: How might these disciplines today find common conversational ground, given their different methodological assumptions in addressing works of visual art? In ‘Aesthetics in Art History – and Vice-versa’, philosopher Paul Crowther argues that philosophical aesthetics and art history can authentically interact but only if their constituencies can agree that image-making possesses an intrinsic value and transhistorical significance for human beings – a kind of autonomy, in effect – which transcends the intellectual and political fashions of specific cultural and historical contexts. But it is just this point, he beieves, that is fundamentally rejected by many art historians and others who espouse ‘“anti-foundationalist” cultural relativist’ approaches to their material, which draw strength from the environment of modern consumerism. The relativist/consumerist collusion is intellectually fuelled by ‘an unquestioning acceptance of the self-contradictory discourses of Foucault, Derrida, and the like’, which have in turn shaped ‘the dominant contextualist modes of recent art history’. For advocates of this approach to art history (Crowther mentions art historians Griselda Pollock, T.J. Clark, Norman Bryson and Keith Moxey as examples, although he does not discuss further details of their views), ‘Art per se is taken to amount to little more than ideas, theories, and their contexts of occurrence’. Such writers’ characteristic way of making the character of art as a fundamental mode of human making contingently dependent on historically fashionable modes of reception and theory is ‘tacitly racist to the profoundest degree’. In arguing along these lines, what such writers fail to appreciate is the explanatory primacy and transhistorically enduring nature of ‘the intrinsic significance of image-making’ – a fact of aesthetic life whose seminal analysis, in Crowther’s view, remains Kant’s theory of fine art and aesthetic ideas.10

In the opposite corner, here is Art History

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