The Future of Art: An Aesthetics of the New and the Sublime (review)

Marcella Tarozzi Goldsmith’s The Future of Art: An Aesthetics of the New and the Sublime is a philosophical response to Hegel’s claim that art is dead. Commencing with an examination of the initial stages of the history of aesthetic theory, Goldsmith addresses the question: What is art? by exploring Schiller’s notion of subjectivity, i.e., imagination, desire, and will. Schelling, however, develops the structure for an understanding of the objectivity of art; art represents the objective pole of an infinite intuition that seeks to reveal the truth of mythology and allegory; hence, the work of art is the most complete ‘object’ imaginable. Since emphasis on the objectivity of the work of art encounters insurmountable metaphysical problems, Goldsmith turns to Hegel for a viable alternative aesthetic theory. Hegel’s tripartite analysis in his attempt to think the concept, however, exposes art to negativity; unlike philosophy, committed to argument, art cannot justify its own existence; in relation to religion and philosophy art is insignificant. Having purified logical categories of the sensuous, Hegel dismisses art; art, including symbolic art, classicism, romanticism, the beautiful, and the sublime, dies in the face of the attempt to think absolute.

Confronting the death of art, Goldsmith explores the category of the New as a challenge to imitation in the arts and to the truth and meaning of art. Dilthey’s hermeneutics provides art with a new beginning, by examining meaningful expression in art and the psychology of the experience of the beautiful and the sublime. While the concept of neutrality avoids moralistic notions of art, i.e., art must be beautiful and the beautiful is superior to style, as a human activity that intensifies the structure of intersubjectivity, art is not neutral; it is creative. If style is the primary focus, however, art is endangered by the decadence of formalism; art may end in nihilism. Recognizing Nietzsche for rehabilitating rhetoric, displacing beauty as the only object of art, and understanding art as consolation, Goldsmith argues that he, aware of his own decadence, warns of the persistent dangers of nihilism. In response to the dangers of nihilism, Nietzsche consigns art not to being, but to becoming—to the Übermensch, the artist of the future; art is the human activity most worth encouraging. As the result of the will to power, art negates the metaphysical pretensions of aesthetics by rejecting the truth of its own object—the artifact. Hence, a new type of nihilism emerges—one that negates its own premises—“sublime nihilism.”

Turning to contemporary aesthetic theory, Goldsmith examines utopia, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. Nihilism and utopia are the two faces of art; art has an affinity to the utopian because it deals with the imaginable; with the end of the aesthetics of the beautiful, however, utopia also disappears. Denying postmodernism the final word on art, she inspects the “aesthetic subject”—the subject that must question its own significance in the face of the sublime. Still, the meaning of the subject is ambiguous; the aesthetic subject fails; it is neither completely objective nor subjective. Invaluable to reflection, hermeneutics grasps the transitory truth of art that is constantly reconstituting itself. Allowing the return to the history of a work of art, hermeneutics re-examines formerly uncharted truths and the connections between various interpretative strategies. Hermeneutics then enables a multiplicity of interpretations of the aesthetic subject and the work of art; reflection on the New is possible. The difficulty, however, is: what precisely is the New in art? The more one looks to the truth of art to identify the New, the more one will encounter the sublime as that which is indispensable to aesthetic experience and to aesthetic theory. Pursuing the truth of art as that which escapes consciousness, psychoanalysis is nihilistic; still, Goldsmith embraces psychoanalytic interpretation not for its analysis of the artifact, but for its examination of artistic activity that creates the New. The New then is an aesthetic category; indeed, it is...