What does aesthetics mean today?

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?