Art beyond aesthetics: Philosophical criticism, art history and contemporary art

Art History

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 651-670

  Osborne, Peter ^a  

^a MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33244471209     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00442.x     Document Type: Review

References (52)

1. Harold Rosenberg, 'Criticism and its Premises', in Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations, Chicago, 1975, 135-52, 146.
2. Dave Hickey's work is paradigmatic. See Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, Los Angeles, 1997.
3. This situation dates back to the failure of the project of a 'critical' postmodernism in the face of the problem of judgement. Hal Foster identified the problem early on (see Hal Foster, 'The Problem of Pluralism', Art in America, January 1982;
4. reprinted as 'Against Pluralism' in Hal Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, Seattle, 1985, chap. 1), but has made no headway with it, theoretically.
5. Just how blocked the problem has become can be seen in the recent roundtable discussion, 'The Present Conditions of Art Criticism', October, 100, Spring 2002, 220-8, in which the very idea of critical judgement causes consternation among the discussants, who appear to associate it, almost exclusively, with a late Greenbergian notion of 'quality'.
6. Cf. 'Sign and Image', Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London and New York, 2000, chap. 2.
7. For reflections on the problem of visual essentialism from within studies in visual culture, see W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture', Journal of Visual Culture, 1:2, August 2002, 165-81;
8. Mieke Bal, 'Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture', Journal of Visual Culture, 2:1, April 2003,15-32.
9. For a critique of the cultural conservatism of Deleuze's aesthetic conception of art, as exemplified in The Logic of Sensation, his book on Francis Bacon, see Art & Language and Tom Baldwin, 'Deleuze's Bacon', Radical Phiiosophy, 123, January/February 2004, 29-40. The character and object domain of studies in visual culture remain plural and contested; their relations to art history unresolved. However, in so far as 'the visual' is the constituting focus of conceptual interest, whether as a given or a construct, it is in principle indifferent to - and hence cuts across - the art/non-art distinction, which cannot be reduced to any particular visual-cultural regimes, Michael Fried's optical reduction of Greenberg's medium-specific conception of modernist painting notwithstanding. Fried's opticalism is currently enjoying a revival on the back of the popularity of theories of the gaze, which function as one form of theoretical compensation for the aesthetic deficit of the semiotic paradigm. While this has contributed to the development of a theory of spectatorship, it remains conceptually removed from the critical problem of judgements of art, which was its locus in Fried's work of the 1960s.
10. T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven and London, 1999;
11. Michael Fried, Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth Century Berlin, New Haven and London, 2002.
12. Rosenberg, 'Criticism and its Premises', 148.
13. For a traditionalist like Hans Belting, the crisis of art history does not lie in a crisis of method, or object domain, but in the fact that 'art history can no longer be the guiding image of our historical culture.' Hans Belting, Art History After Modernism, Chicago and London, 2003, 6.
14. (This is a revised and expanded edition of Belting's The End of the History of Art?, Chicago, 1987.) However, contra Belting, this is not because of any Hegelian issues about the 'end of art' (it is not because art can no longer offer a guiding image of historical culture), but because of the temporal logic of modernism as a culture of negation.
15. 'Our' historical culture is a culture of negation; it thus preserves (negatively) only what it has determinately overcome. Criticism is the discursive medium of this (negatively preserving) overcoming which, in rendering explicit the historical relations of the work, completes the work. This is the modernist element in the Hegelian dialectic, emphasized by Adorno. Cf. 'Modernity: A Different Time', in Peter Osborne, The Poiitics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, London and New York, 1995, chap. 1;
16. 'Modernism as Translation', and 'Time and the Artwork' in Philosophy in Cultural Theory, chaps 3 and 5.
17. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, trans. Steven Rendall, Princeton, 2000, 3.
18. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 4-5.
19. Arthur Danto, 'The End of Art', in Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York, 1986, 81-115;
20. Art After the End of Art, Princeton, 1997.
21. See, for example, Dave Beech, John Roberts et al., The Philistine Controversy, London and New York, 2002;
22. and, more generally, John Roberts, 'After Adorno: Art Autonomy, and Critique - A Literature Review', Historical Materialism, 7, Winter 2000, 221-39.
23. Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford, 1975, vol. 1, 1.
24. Even Adorno is not exempt from this terminological confusion, although more than anyone else he provides us with the philosophical means to clarify it; and he is at least more terminologically careful than his translators. The second English translation of Aesthetic Theory, by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London, 1997), is at times worse than the first in this respect.
25. This deficiency is thus found equally in aestheticism and one of its main philosophical opponents, Heideggerianism, which, whilst philosophically 'anti-aesthetic', is so in the name of a Romanticism of Being, to which 'art' is appended as an 'original' appearing. The history of art is thus subordinated there to an epochal history of Being in which the present's openness to the future functions only as the basis for a 'return to origin'. For a recent example, exemplary in its philosophical orthodoxy, despite some updating of its artistic exemplars (e.g. Kafka), see Giorgio Agamben's The Man Without Content (1994), trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford, 1999.
26. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, Minneapolis, 1991, 5.
27. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge, A21;
28. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement-Power, trans. Werner Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1987;
29. Kritik der Urteilskraft, Werkausgabe Band X, broadcast by Wilheim Weischedel, Frankfurt am Main, 1974. The precursor of this integration was, of course, Baumgarten, but Baumgarten's immediately cognitive (intuitive) version of aesthetic as a discourse on taste failed to resonate beyond the eighteenth century, mainly because of Kant's decisive epistemological critique.
30. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 172, 230 (emphasis added);
31. Kritik der Urteilskraft, 239, 299.
32. Karl Ameriks, 'Hegel's Aesthetics: New Responses to Kant and Romanticism', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 45/46, 2002, 72-92.
33. Hegel's Aesthetics, 1.
34. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B152-6.
35. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990,129-33.
36. Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester, 1990;
37. J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, University Park, PA, 1992.
38. Bernstein has recently changed his position on this. See his 'Introduction', in J.M. Bernstein, ed., Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge, 2003, xviii-xxii.
39. August Schlegel, 'Lectures on Aesthetics', in H. J. Schulte-Sasse et al., eds, Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, Minneapolis, 1997,197.
40. F.W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath, Charlottesville, 1978, part 6, 219-33.
41. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, 32;
42. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1996.
43. David Summers, The Judgement of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics, Cambridge, 1987.
44. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art, London, 1987.
45. See Bernstein, Ciassical and Romantic German Aesthetics, xii-xviii,
46. 'Social Signs and Natural Bodies: On T.J. Clark's Farewell to an Idea', Radical Philosophy, 104, November/December 2000, 25-38.
47. See the argument of my 'Survey', in Peter Osborne, ed., 'Conceptual Art, London, 2002,13-51.
48. Cf. Peter Osborne, 'Conceptual Art as/and Philosophy', in Jon Bird and Michael Newman, eds, Rewriting Conceptual Art: Critical and Historical Approaches, London, 1999, 65.
49. For the concept of distributive unity, see my 'Photography in an Expanding Field: Distributive Unity and Dominant Form' in David Green, ed., Where is the Photograph?, Brighton, 2003, 63-70, 66-8;
50. 'Everywhere or Not at All: Victor Burgin and Conceptual Art', in Catsou Roberts, ed., Victor Burgin: Relocating, Bristol, 2002, 62-75, 75.
51. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone Press, 1997, 263, 2-3;
52. Ästhetische Theorie, 392,11-12.