To browse Academia. A philosophical exploration of engagement in art, elaborating on the work of Susanne K. Five interconnected essays address the role of art and the artist in society, conceptual and performance art, beauty and the gaze, aestheticism, and the cultural politics of the art-world.
For those who have the fortune of being exposed to the swirling world of contemporary visual arts, with its global art fairs, gallery openings, and auction houses, the discovery of philosophical aesthetics and of the categories of art history might at times appear as the greatest misfortune. This is, obviously, a provocative statement, but a statement that, in its exaggerated tone, points to a real and tangible chasm between the tradition of philosophical aesthetics and the tumultuous, ever-morphing status of artistic production and fruition.
Halsall et all eds. Art writing normally contrasts art with "everyday life. Art, as we know it, is not common to all forms of society but is peculiar to our own; what art is changes with people's conceptions of the tasks of art, conceptions that are themselves a part of social history. The history of society does not shape art from the outside, but includes the attempts of artists to find new ways of making art and thinking about it.
If you were to take an overview of the most important critical artistic practices from the mids onwards and the attempts by art theory to analyse them, forgetting both the most applause-hungry provo artists such as Damian Hirstβwhose critique of the art institution is almost non-existentβand spectacular, willingly instrumental creative city artists such as Olafur Eliasson, I think we would have to distinguish four overlapping practices: relational aesthetics, institutional critique, socially engaged art, and tactical media.
It is evident, of course, that we are trying to account for phenomena whose identities are in no way fixed but are in movement, and that, for instance, former oppositions between the avant-garde's anti-institutional " over-politicization " and anti-aesthetic institutional critique are gradually changing.
