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Let me choose as a starting point for my reaction the way in which Jay Bernstein situates Kant’s third critique in relation to the first and second critiques.1 I agree with his analysis when he speaks about a role that aesthetics as a specific disposition of the subject toward the world plays in the general economy of Kant’s discourse. But continuing to speak about the aesthetic attitude, Bernstein suddenly and without any additional explanations substitutes for the word “world” the word “artwork,” so that aesthetics begins to be related to art, instead of the world. However, the aesthetic attitude, as it is understood by Kant, does not need art—being, besides science and ethics, a specific mode of our relation to reality. It is an old truism that all the wonders of art pale in comparison with the wonders of nature. In terms of aesthetic experience, no work of art can stand comparison with a sunset of even average beauty. And, of course, the sublime side of nature and politics can be fully experienced only through witnessing a natural catastrophe , revolution, or war—not by reading a novel or looking at a picture. That was the shared opinion of Kant and the Romantic poets and artists who launched the first influential aesthetic discourses: the real world, not art, is the legitimate object of the aesthetic attitude (as well as of scientific and ethical attitudes). According to Kant, the artwork can become a legitimate object of aesthetic contemplation only as a work of genius, that is, only as a kind of natural force. The profession of art can serve only as a means of education in taste and aesthetic judgment. After this education is completed, art can and should be, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, thrown away and the subject confronted with the aesthetic experience of life itself. Seen from the aesthetic perspective, art reveals itself as something that can and should be overcome. All things can be seen from the aesthetic perspective; all things can serve as sources of aesthetic experience and become objects of aesthetic judgment. From the perspective of aesthetics, art has no privileged position. Rather, art is something that posits itself between the subject of the aesthetic attitude and the world. However, the grown-up, mature subject does not need the aesthetic tutelage of art, being able to rely on his or her own sensibility and taste. The aesthetic discourse, if it is used to legitimize art, de facto undermines it. But then how to explain the fact that the discourse of aesthetics gained such a dominant position in art matters during the period of modernity? The main reason for this is a statistical one. When aesthetic reflection on art began and developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, artists were in the minority and spectators were in the majority. The question of why to do art seemed to not aesthetics or anti-aesthetics but poetics Boris Groys 1. Section 1 of the Seminars. Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 136 be irrelevant. Artists did art to earn their living. That was a sufficient explanation for the existence of arts; the problem was why other people should look at art. The answer was, to form their taste and develop their aesthetic sensibility. Art was a school for the gaze and other senses. The division between artists and spectators seemed to be clear-cut and socially firmly established. Spectators were subjects of an aesthetic attitude—the artworks produced by the artists were objects of aesthetic contemplation, or rather, of the aesthetic consumer. The spectator expects from art the so-called aesthetic experience. This can be an experience of sensual pleasure, but it can also be an anti-aesthetic experience of displeasure, of frustration provoked by an artwork that lacks all the qualities that an affirmative aesthetics expects it to have. It can be an aesthetic experience of a utopian vision that will lead humankind out of its present condition to a new society in which beauty reigns, or an experience of redistribution of the sensible , one that refigures the spectator’s field of vision by showing certain things and giving access to certain voices that were earlier concealed or obscured. But it can be also an anti-aesthetic demonstration of the impossibility of positive aesthetic experience within a society based on oppression and exploitation due to a total commercialization and commodification of art that undermines, from the beginning, any possible utopian perspective. As we know...

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