T
he history of genesis of the modern concepts of both art and aesthetics is fairly well known.In the case of art, it is about its gradual detachment from crafts and from its defined functions in terms of representational symbolic character, towards constituting its own completely particular sphere,
as described in e.g. Paul Oskar Kristeller’s influential scholarly studies.1 During the 18th century, this development eventually leads to a situation, where “art” may be described and conceived of as a collective singular of a quite distinct character. Above all, as something so historically peculiar that, by definition, it has no purpose outside itself. Art in that sense has become autonomous. With this new general concept it also becomes possible and natural to operate with a system of ”artforms” with a joint reference to a supreme substance, c.f. Batteux’s famous treatise from 1742.2 Moreover, differences and similarities may now be discussed in a comparative ranking, as done by G.E. Lessing in 1766.3
Aesthetics as a concept, equally well known, is named by A.G.
Baumgarten in the 1730s, and is codified as the discipline about (a particular kind of) sensuous cognition in his Aesthetica from 1750.4 But prior to Baumgarten’s specific definition of the concept, still more widespread considerations about the preferences of an audience had arisen, about good and bad taste, and in general, about the specific functions in the sense-based perception of distinctive types of phenomena, as e.g. in Hume.5 And shortly after Baumgarten’s work, the “aesthetic relation” and the particular conceptual physiognomy of the judgment of taste is analysed by Immanuel Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft from 1790, an important work which is basically still adequate.6
It has, however, been less known, or at least less recognized that the separation of the two conceptual fields of “art” and “the aesthetic” not only takes place in the same process, but that the two concepts, in addition, actually presuppose and precondition each other. Jacques Rancière, in his Aisthesis, 20117, accurately analyses how the very separation of production from reception, of poiesis from aiesthesis, constitutes the possibility for their respective independence and thus for their diverging directions of
1 Paul Oskar Kristeller. 1980. See also Larry Shiner. 2001.
2 See Charles Batteux (”Abbé Batteux”). 1746. Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe.
3 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. 1766. Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie.
4 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. 1750. Theoretische Ästhetik. Die grundlegenden Abschnitte aus der “Aesthetica”, 58. Translated by Hans Rudolf Schweizer. 1988.
5 David Hume. 1757. Of the Standard of Taste.
6 Immanuel Kant. 1790. Kritik der Urteilskraft. See also Morten Kyndrup 2018.
7 See Jacques Rancière. 2011. Jacques Rancière. 2013.
development to come. Historically, this separation takes place during a long process. In aesthetics, it is about the gradual formation of an audience, including the subjective feeling or experience of being a part of/
belonging to an audience like that – and by this, the legitimation of being able to experience and to express oneself on behalf of this audience. This new independency of the perception side and the receiver position can also be detected for instance in language. Raw nature may now become a landscape, i.e. something that is clearly experienced as addressing somebody. And such a landscape may even be positively characterized as picturesque (that is as something, which looks like a picture of a landscape).
The addressedness is made explicit, and anybody’s feeling of oneself being the target of this address is strengthened, and eventually resulting in an increased inclination towards personal evaluation, judgment of taste.
On the production side, the artists are gradually changing orientation towards the production of works, no longer referring to specific commissions for predefined purposes by a materially privileged client/patron, but now towards a still more generalized (art)market, in which the preferences of an anonymous audience are becoming materially significant too. This means that artworks are now produced in anticipation of a subsequent judgment (of taste), the outcome of which the artist is unable to know during the creating process. The break or the detachment between production and reception therefore becomes absolute in a completely new sense, historically. The artist is unable to produce according to anything but his/her own feeling of quality (a feeling, which then soon after comes to be characterised as an inner necessity). Art, which panders to the supposed taste of an audience, is downgraded because it violates the dictum of art as “purposiveness without a purpose”. In that way, the separation seems absolute, although, historically, to a high extent, the two sides have produced each other. The artistic genius, according to Rancière, becomes the hazardous bridge stretched between two heterogeneous kinds of logic – the concept implemented by art, and beauty without a concept.8 “And” he continues, “it is exactly this separation between the reasons of art and those of beauty, which makes art exist as such, as its own world, and not simply as a skill of the artist.”
8 Rancière. 2011, 30. 2013, 11.
From the beginning, the mutual complex interdependency of these concepts is thus completely literal and concrete. The modern concept of an autonomous art would not have arisen without the segregation of a historically new particular approach to this art from a “somebody” to which it addresses itself, i.e. without a distinctively separate aesthetic relation. No art without aesthetics. Conversely, no aesthetics without art either. The nurturing and the development of a specific area, “art”, that can offer us an arsenal of singular artefacts, created for no other purpose than for being purposeless objects for our judgment-oriented perception, historically becomes the greenhouse of aesthetic relationality. From being mainly just a passive registration of the fact that something may be to one’s taste, it develops into the concise evaluative relation, which establishes an actual passage from “me” over “that” to (the notion of) a “we” – the way we have known it since Kant.9
It is, however, also important to notice that, in its point of departure, this sensuous perception – which later was to become the aesthetic one – was not limited to art only. This is true already of Baumgarten’s very definition of the concept.
In general, the basic separation of production and reception could evidently never have taken place outside the space of a developing Modern, in which differentiation of access and values, in terms of independency and interrelationship, made it possible at all to conceive of that kind of differences also asymmetrically. The good, the true, and the beautiful are no longer parallel values. A system of differing regimes is about to be created, making e.g. the beautiful not necessarily true – nor good.
The creation by the Modern of an independent area of “science”, during the same process and time, opens a new flank in the complicated interplay between art and the aesthetic. By now, the art sciences too are born, both in terms of independent areas concerning especially visual arts and literature, but later concerning all the art forms, one by one. On top of that, a scientific
9 Concerning the ”passage”, see Morten Kyndrup. 2008, esp. p. 36; 105ff. Parts of this book’s points of view have been published in English. See Morten Kyndrup. 2013. ”Art, Aesthetics – Divorce?” in: Site, no. 33, 107–118. And in German, see Morten Kyndrup. 2012. ”Ästhetik, Kunst und Kunstverstandnis. Die Kunst und das Kunstwerk”, in Neue Rundschau Heft 1. 187–200.
approach to the general concept of “art” is created, thus paving the way for general theory of art and comparative arts as perspectives. As we will see, the rise of the art sciences implies an even more complex system of theoretical boundaries in the history of development to come, in particular as regards the boundaries of aesthetics as a discipline.