B
orn during the same process and possibly out of the same topos but irrevocably separated thereafter: art and the aesthetic are now historically going to refer to something different. At least to two different aspects of the “same” – if the production by an artist, and the perception by a receiver of an artwork can be designated as one and the same. Decisive, however, is the difference in modus.“Art” comes to designate an area (system, institution) which, above all, contains artworks, each and every one singular. This area basically has its own rules and its own (absence of) purpose in relation to society as a whole.
It is exempted from the general purpose rationality of the Modern. Its inhabitants are creating artists, but also acting intermediators, critics, and even a number of permanent institutions, such as museums, concert halls, etc. The area has boundaries (and accordingly, keepers). Its boundaries separate it from other, discursive areas.
“The aesthetic”, on the other hand, refers to a distinctive kind of evaluative subject-object relation, to a specific kind of relationality. In principle it is always singular, but of course this singularity includes the fact that aesthetic appreciations do produce (and are produced by) history and tradition, which thus form part of the actual properties of any given relation. The aesthetic has its boundaries as well, but they are separating it from other types of relation. An aesthetic relation is a potentiality; an offer to every one of us, among other kinds of relations, we may enter into.
The separation, as it were, did not result in two “similar” or even congruent formative concepts in terms of mode or logical extension. This
observation is important to maintain, also when analysing the long-term consequences of the separation of both sides. For example, as noted by Jacques Rancière, it is important to recognize, that the previous alliance or harmony between poiesis and aisthesis in the premodern was what provided mimesis with its necessary space of function.10 And conversely, the mimetic operation was able to guarantee this harmony or close connection. The separation breaks down this representative order in favour of a new “opposition” between individuality (the artist) and collectivity (the audience). However, it also marks the end of any mimetic commitment of the artwork, and in the long run, during the 20th century, this, in extreme cases, leads to the end of the expectation that an artwork should possess any immediate sensuous appeal, and even have any (permanent) character of a stable object at all.
During the further historical development, the profound character and irreversible consequences of the separation, however, were not always respected by the dominating traditions of understanding, or perhaps rather: in many cases, the separation was referred to and made use of for other kinds of purposes.
It would take us too far here to just even outline the genesis and development of the varying traditions of understanding within aesthetics, from late 18th century and up to now, or to analyse the complex reasons for the widespread, non-stringent understanding of the physiognomy and consequences of the original separation. This absence however, of consistency and stringency, is evidently not coincidental, and it is intimately linked to a general ambivalence towards the Modern differentiations, an ambivalence which is and has been true of greater parts of societal thinking, ever since the Enlightenment.
However, one tradition worth mentioning here is one, which subsequently was to become the by far most dominating one in the thinking of art and the aesthetic, in the western Modern. Namely the one, which, based on the quest for unity in Romanticism, makes art and aesthetics reconcile in a particular “marriage” (as it has been called in another
10 See Rancière 2013, 11.
context11). In this tradition, aesthetics becomes “philosophy of art” schlicht und einfach, i.e. it becomes the discipline about what art is, so G. F. W. Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics, from the 1820s.12 Aesthetics is here made the servant and the master of art, at the same time. It becomes the master ratio, which, on the one side, is able to reinscribe art into the societal standard discourse (by being capable and willing to describe it philosophically). On the other side, it serves by helping to keep art outside and “autonomous”, by formulating and thus representing its unbridgeable particularity. But up against the original modal separation and our question here about a broader concept of aesthetics, this tradition is surprisingly blind. It is blind when it comes to developing a further understanding of what aesthetic value and relationality actually is and is able to, and it is particularly blind to the mere thought of even considering aesthetics as something, which might refer to anything but the area of art.
This “speculative” tradition, as it has been critically characterized by e.g.
Jean-Marie Schaeffer in his crusade against it, remains dominating during the centuries to follow, and it is still immensely influential – probably also where the development patterns of art itself are concerned. Schaeffer even asserts that this tradition has ruined important qualities of art by imposing on it a permanent cognitive bias. This aesthetics’ demand for (true) cognitive content has historically resulted in an overload of artworks aiming at exactly this.13 A good example is the entire tradition within art, which is feeling evoked to primarily reflecting the question about what art basically is, culminating e.g. in the gesture of conceptual art, completely devoid of any immediate sensuous qualities.
Probably, this development cannot be conceived of as simply as narrated by Schaeffer. No doubt, this continental tradition (as it was eventually called, in the broadest sense) for one thing has been able to contribute decisively to the analysis of what art, within the Modern, is capable of. And on top of that, in many cases it has incarnated a broader substantial critique
11 See Morten Kyndrup. 2013.
12 See Hegel, G.F.W. 1986. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik.
13 Jean-Marie Schaeffer. 1992. L’Art de l’âge modern. Translated into English as Art of the Modern Age. Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. 2000.
of society and modernity with art as its privileged perspective (as in e.g.
Theodor W. Adorno).
However, this tradition has not been capable of setting aesthetics free of its partnership with art, let alone of aesthetics’ (inadequate) status of being “only” a philosophy (about art). It has even actively tried to resist any attempts of understanding aesthetics in a broader sense and in a different modal position towards art. As late as in 1993, and with contemptuous arrogance, Karl-Heinz Bohrer characterises the attempts to broaden out the concept of aesthetics like this, ”Ein Terror liegt über dem land: Die Acceptanz des Ästhetischen”.14 And, accordingly, in e.g. his considerations about a general “aestheticization”, Wolfgang Welsch carefully distinguishes between bad (surface) aestheticization, and phenomena, where the aesthetic qualities are supposed to lie deeper (in accordance with the Hegelian “depth model”).15
In the perspective of theories of modernity, this “speculative tradition”
in aesthetics may be characterized, with some justification, as anti-modern, although probably ‘wider Willen’. It has refused to take the initial separation seriously, and thereby refused to conceive of the differentiation in terms of something, which also necessarily produces actual emergent and irreversible differences: different perspectives, different analyses, and different discourses.
The ambition of being able to survey and thus “own” art, by verbalizing its properties, may be construed as a lack of real acknowledgement of the particularity of art, of its autonomy. Concordantly, the rejection of investigating aesthetic relationality in its singularity, through analyses of artefacts, within as well as outside art, has contributed to a weakening of the separation itself.
From time to time, this weakening has led said tradition into a dead end of critical self-sufficiency, in which the artworks themselves became reduced to mere examples of the adequacy of theory and critique.
Against that, the art sciences have worked intensely and successfully on developing the analyses and the understandings of the potentials of
14 See Bohrer, Karl Heinz. 2–5 Sept., 1992. “Die Grenzen des Ästhetischen“, in Die Aktualität des Ästhetischen [Der Kongress „Die Aktualität von Ästhetischen“]. Hrsg. von Wolfgang Welsch in Zusammenarb. mit Ivo Frenzel. 1993. München: Fink.
15 See for example Wolfgang Welsch. 1997.
singular artefactual functions, ever since the latter half of the 20th century.
This has resulted in radical improvements of the analyses of the functional mechanisms of artworks, but has also implied a further increase of the distance between aesthetics and the art sciences, respectively, concerning what art is and does. This distance is an important component of the complex scenery within theory today.