A concept inherited from idealist philosophy, referring to principles of taste, especially good taste, and hence of beauty.
Popularized as a concept in the late nineteenth century, aesthetics was captured by the discourse of ‘art for art’s sake’, becoming associated with the ‘refined’ appreciation of beauty in the arts. Its idealist connotations remain, however, in the attempt to elaborate the said principles of taste as transcendent, that is, going beyond any one period, culture or medium, and going beyond any one person’s subjective responses. The object of study for aesthetics is the art-object itself, taken out of its historical, cultural and means-of-production context. It is studied in relation to other art objects and in relation to the already-established discourse of aesthetics, with the purpose of isolating those textual properties which can be said to render it beautiful. The difficulty with such an approach, of course, is that it completely fails to ‘place’ the criteria for taste and beauty within the context of their own production – they are assumed to be somehow ‘there’ in art objects. This has rightly attracted the criticism of Marxist critics and others who see aesthetics as an ideological discourse which attempts to ‘objectify’ (reify) the interests of one particular class faction and pose them as universal abstractions with a claim on all.
However, once recognized as an ideological discourse, bourgeois–idealist aesthetics itself becomes an interesting object of study, raising questions about the relations between particular social formations and their more elaborate forms of cultural production. The main question, of course, is can there be a materialist, ‘Marxist’ or feminist aesthetics, and how would it differ from what exists already?
The term aesthetic has gained some currency in semiotics, especially in the notion of an aesthetic code. This is taken to be a code in which the production of meaning within the terms of recognized (conventional) expression is not the aim but the starting point of a given message. It prioritizes the signifier over the signified, and seeks to exploit rather than confirm the limits and constraints of the form, genre or convention within which it operates. Hence aesthetic codes put a premium on innovation, entropy, experimentation with the raw materials of signification, and are deemed to evoke pleasurable responses for that reason. Semiotics may perhaps claim to have broken ranks with idealist aesthetics in its attempt to find a value-free and culturally specific description of aesthetic codes, and thence to find such codes operating in discourses not usually associated with the category ‘art’: advertising copy, political slogans, graffiti and the output of mass commodity and mass media production, for example.
Popularized as a concept in the late nineteenth century, aesthetics was captured by the discourse of ‘art for art’s sake’, becoming associated with the ‘refined’ appreciation of beauty in the arts. Its idealist connotations remain, however, in the attempt to elaborate the said principles of taste as transcendent, that is, going beyond any one period, culture or medium, and going beyond any one person’s subjective responses. The object of study for aesthetics is the art-object itself, taken out of its historical, cultural and means-of-production context. It is studied in relation to other art objects and in relation to the already-established discourse of aesthetics, with the purpose of isolating those textual properties which can be said to render it beautiful. The difficulty with such an approach, of course, is that it completely fails to ‘place’ the criteria for taste and beauty within the context of their own production – they are assumed to be somehow ‘there’ in art objects. This has rightly attracted the criticism of Marxist critics and others who see aesthetics as an ideological discourse which attempts to ‘objectify’ (reify) the interests of one particular class faction and pose them as universal abstractions with a claim on all.
However, once recognized as an ideological discourse, bourgeois–idealist aesthetics itself becomes an interesting object of study, raising questions about the relations between particular social formations and their more elaborate forms of cultural production. The main question, of course, is can there be a materialist, ‘Marxist’ or feminist aesthetics, and how would it differ from what exists already?
The term aesthetic has gained some currency in semiotics, especially in the notion of an aesthetic code. This is taken to be a code in which the production of meaning within the terms of recognized (conventional) expression is not the aim but the starting point of a given message. It prioritizes the signifier over the signified, and seeks to exploit rather than confirm the limits and constraints of the form, genre or convention within which it operates. Hence aesthetic codes put a premium on innovation, entropy, experimentation with the raw materials of signification, and are deemed to evoke pleasurable responses for that reason. Semiotics may perhaps claim to have broken ranks with idealist aesthetics in its attempt to find a value-free and culturally specific description of aesthetic codes, and thence to find such codes operating in discourses not usually associated with the category ‘art’: advertising copy, political slogans, graffiti and the output of mass commodity and mass media production, for example.
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