What does aesthetics mean today?

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I know very little about what goes on in 'proper' philosophical aesthetics at the moment (although there are several problems already in this sentence): but I know something of the discourse of aesthetics from the early eighteenth century onwards. I have been wondering whether we've gone back to the eighteenth century -- in which (roughly) aesthetics is keyed to sensibility rather than imagination. This would mean (something like) the displacement of the whole problem of cultural value and a return to the affective nature of art. If this is correct, doesn't it give us a better base to compare and contrast different contemporary art-forms (horror movies scare us, sitcoms make us laugh, conceptual art flatters us) than the romanticism derived problem of high-art / mass-culture?

alext (alext), Wednesday, 30 October 2002 14:23 (twenty-three years ago)

Having been teaching a basic introduction to literary theory for a few weeks I have been struck by the fact that many of the attitudes to art which I tend to associate with Romanticism and against which so much polemic has been written in the last fifty years (artist taps into Truth and Beauty and serves it up for those less able to appreciate the finer things, art as a realm of experience which cannot be judged by utility) just aren't part of the way my students think about art.

alext (alext), Wednesday, 30 October 2002 14:25 (twenty-three years ago)

how would kant have explained hanle y?

mark s (mark s), Wednesday, 30 October 2002 14:31 (twenty-three years ago)

I really like the website "Philosophy in cyberspace", especially its section devoted to aesthetics.

nathalie (nathalie), Wednesday, 30 October 2002 16:46 (twenty-three years ago)


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