I don't think the list is dead, but in several senses it's much narrower than its predecessor -- the official online ASA website. The ASA decided to terminate the "forum" aspect of that site where any topic of potential interest to aestheticians could be introduced for discussion by members.
The ASA never made public its reasons for shutting down the give-and-take forum, but, though the loss was brutal, my conjectures made the decision understandable. I guessed the largest reason was that a small number of renegade listers were making the forum, call it, unseemly. The exchanges too often deteriorated into vicious name-calling, the topics went far adrift from aesthetics, the evident lack of seriously informed backgrounds of many listers probably put off the academics on the list (in most universities aesthetics is a sub-division of philosophy). Since the creation of our aesthetics online forum, we have actually kicked out some listers whose agendas felt foreign to the forum's intent. (One of them actually admitted that his primary goal was to test the forum's tolerance of outrageous postings. It was startling to me to discover there were such semi-deranged mentalities at large. In his case where he was "at large" was dismaying indeed: He was teaching philosophy in an eastern U.S. college.) I say the loss was brutal because almost no academicians from the old list stayed with the new list. A number of those former listers have gone on to publish interesting and respected books on philosophy of art. A trend that the ASA may have noted back then has reached full flood on the new list: The great majority of the listers are now visual artists. I think we're lucky to have them, but one result has been that the threads are heavily dominated by visual art. And more often than not the focus is not on any aspect of the aesthetics of the genre, but on the market, museum policies, etc. The ASA continues to publish its hard-copy quarterly, THE JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND ART CRITICISM. (I receive it because, though I'm not a teaching academic, I'm a paid-up member of the ASA.) The latest edition has pieces and extended book reviews on the aesthetics of music, drama, film, and literature, as well as on aesthetics itself -- e.g. the nature of "aesthetic experience". I'm all for my learning about the concerns of painters -- even down to questions of technique, finding buyers, calling attention to the leading practitioners of past and present, and more. But I realize I have almost nothing to add there. And when I've tried to stir discussion of additional genres, or of hard-core aesthetic questions, I find very little interest seems to obtain in other listers. I don't blame our other listers. I just wish we had still OTHER listers. But I don't want to believe the list is dead. I think it just dozes a bit.
