Are you sure you read this carefully enough,before shooting it down as not expressed with sufficient clarity for discussion? It is always possible to improve on any phrasing but sometimes the problem,clumsily stated as it may be, is more interesting than straightening out the prose. KAte Sullivan -----Original Message----- From: Cheerskep <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, Oct 13, 2012 12:30 pm Subject: Re: Papers: "Aesthetic Autonomy Reconsidered" by Bret Schneider
Bret Schneider's long foggy ramble shows what can happen when the microphone falls into the hands of someone who has a tireless tongue but lacks the required head to cope with his own blurry but reifying abstraction-terms. Exhibit One: His first sentence is: "'Autonomy' has crept into the lexicon of contemporary art." 'Autonomy' is then the verbal motif sounded throughout his piece. And yet at no time does it occur to him he should convey what he has in mind with the word. The number one concern of any worthy writer has to be the notions his words are likely to occasion in his readers' minds. Schneider's attention appears to be concerned only with his own (suspect until proven otherwise) notions. Another motif throughout the piece is 'misinterpretation'. Sounds very apt for this piece. In a message dated 10/13/12 10:18:32 AM, [email protected] writes:
Sent from my iPhone Please excuse grammar and spelling errors Expect everything - fear nothing - or did I get that backwards Saul ostrow 646 528 8537 Begin forwarded message: > From: "Art&Education" <[email protected]> > Date: October 13, 2012 6:00:12 AM EDT > To: [email protected] > Subject: Papers: "Aesthetic Autonomy Reconsidered" by Bret Schneider > Reply-To: [email protected] > > October 13, 2012 > > Performance view from Hanging Times Athens, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. 2012 courtesy the artists and T293. > Art&Education Papers > Aesthetic Autonomy Reconsidered > > Bret Schneider > Share this: Facebook | Twitter > 'Autonomy' has crept into the lexicon of contemporary art. As contemporary art is a field vaguely founded upon the theoretical rejection of
aesthetic
autonomy, its recent theorization is fraught with particular manifestations of abuse. On one hand, autonomy has become a dirty insult, used
pejoratively.
On the other, it is construed as the restoration of art in an era of its impossibility. In the former scenario, art-activists and political artists, ideological critics, and philosophers see the 'pure form', which is
now
conflated with autonomy as extraneous and perhaps even decadent when understood in a social context of profound social injustice. It is 'merely' aesthetic. In the latter, art is expressly valued for its myopic
focus on
'aesthetics' alone, which in turn is valued for its projected
apolitical
nature, as something that does not take part in the torpor of
contemporary
politics. In other words, left politics is considered so miserable
today
that it drives otherwise political thinkers into depoliticized art.
Neither of
these sentiments are explicit, however. The 'pure art' vs. 'political
art'
debate is itself antiquatedbit was understood as passC) even a century agoband today it does not debate autonomy, but the terms of debate indicate something else entirely: aesthetic autonomy's absence as a meaningful category. It indicates not a discussion of aesthetic autonomy, or even politics, but rather the reconstitution, in a curiously distorted
form, of
a classical debate from the nineteenth century that by the early 1920s
was
mooted by advanced social conditions. This critical framework of
necessary
misinterpretation is one of the defining categorical features of contemporary art. Before our time, we sense, there were notions of the autonomy of
art
in modernity that dabbled in no such simple bifurcation of 'political or apolitical', which are antidotes to conservative times, imparted by conservative times. The very separation of 'political' or 'apolitical' into 'formal' and 'informal' indicates regressionbor at least a mild transfiguration without consciousness of that transfigurationbin
terms of
how we now determine the social situation of art, which isn't to say
the
quality of the art itself. I.e. the meaning of how and why it is misunderstood today demands newfound clarity as a possibly critical
misinterpretation.
The mode of the era is misinterpretation. Autonomy is necessarily misunderstood, but it may ultimately be for the sake of clarifying what autonomous
art
was trying to convey, but could not in its own moment. > > *** > > Autonomy and Society > The construction of 'autonomy' has origins in philosophical and
social
conditions extrinsic to art, but that art was theorized as critical
for
developing. 'Philosophical' and 'social' conditions were not initially perceived as separate, though they were not understood as unified
either,
not in the sense we'd understandbtheir separation is posthumous in a way
that
misunderstands autonomy, and in particular ways does so. These
extrinsic,
or heterogeneous conditions, beginning with the French Revolution and
German
philosophy, have been theorized retrospectively by a number of art historians, philosophers, and political thinkers who perceive the situation of autonomy as 'dead', perhaps in the sense that it can be seen clearly anew. Our
distant
vantage point is an otherness to the moment of autonomy, but not the otherness that autonomous artworks proposed. Seeing this historical development requires a certain imagination. For instance, T.J. Clark imagines Jacques Louis David's Death of Marat (1793) becoming unhinged from the walls of patronage
and
joining the newly articulate masses in the streets of the French Revolution. Imagery becomes synthetic, open to interpretation, and abstract when representing new conditions of social possibility. Idealism and Romanticism were direct reactions to the failure of the French Revolution to sufficiently 'achieve' liberty; aesthetics emerges because art becomes a mirror
not of
concrete reality, but of reality in the image it wants to be, of what
is
embryonic within it. Art in modernity is the representation of efflorescence. This project of the hypothetical, so to speak, led German Romantics to develop an individuation that is in tension with universals that are no longer given; a universal which is critically incomplete, and which has necessary manifestations in different particulars that cannot add up to a
singular
whole, but is a totality nonetheless. Marx articulated this
developmental
process when he said that with modernity, "all that is solid melts
into
air", which may sound today like an indictment of modernity as being
chaotic,
meaningless, or even nihilistic, but what was originally meant was
that
this dynamism registers the mutability and transformability of social conditions. > > This new social world co-developed, and was refined by a philosophy
of
autonomy: the development of a philosophical program of "self-determination". Autonomy to its foundational theorist, Kant, is summed up in his
paper,
Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? His well-known answer
is
that it is "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity". It is "emergent" because humanity for the first time becomes free to think without affirming predetermined values and predetermined institutions. That is, free to think critically, to think through the limits of reflection, and to develop
this
autonomy historically and within a new concept of the public. Marx's
For A
Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing further developed the
necessity
of this projectba thesis on how critique can productively bring about dynamic change by understanding that everything, which exists is incompletely free. In the context of a free but undetermined public, art becomes about its
own
self-determining reconstitution, free from having to reinforce the
social
mores or religious values to which it was once lawfully bound. For example, in the nineteenth century, Baudelaire criticized the regressive
tendencies of
artists who were still cloaking themselves in the past, urging them to paint modern life in all its contradictions. Art's inveterate
self-criticism and
adaptability to problematic contradictions is the reason it survives.
In a
sense, artworks continue because they critically recognize their
possible
death, imitating death, so to speak, and thereby living. Art's
newfound
problematic characterbits critical limitationsbis its origin. > > Read the full article on Art&Education.b(> b(> > > > Ongoing Call for Papers > A free contributor-driven platform, Art&Education Papers seeks to
expand
publication opportunities for art historians, theorists, curators, and artists, and to make papers more easily available to the public. As AE Papers continues to grow, we are reiterating our call for new and existing scholarly articles from around the world.b(> Texts should be research-based
articles
pertaining to art history or contemporary art, and can be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc. We ask
that
you submit pieces anywhere from 2,000 to approximately 7,500 words and
include
a 100-word abstract and full contact information (or publication
information
for previously published texts). All submissions are welcome and will be reviewed and considered for publication on the website. Please submit articles
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