Rediscovering Aesthetics: Transdisciplinary Voices from Art History, Philosophy, and Art Practice (review)

This book is a scholarly investigation into the nature and state of contemporary aesthetics. There are 18 contributors, mostly academics, who approach the notoriously slippery subject of aesthetics from three broadly different disciplines—art history, philosophy and art practice.

The contributors to this volume do not adopt a coherent and agreed line. This is to be expected as they come from different theoretical and practical backgrounds whose presuppositions and practices are being reshaped in significant ways as interpretations and debate emerge

(p. 11).

Rediscovering Aesthetics is not a popular style book for the general reader. It is deeply philosophical, highly theoretical and at times abstruse. This is not a criticism per se—the subject matter, aesthetics as differentiated from art, warrants such deep investigation and discussion. The book is directed toward students, cultural theorists, philosophers and possibly artists who are grappling with the present volatility, constant changeability and, some would argue, fundamental vacuity of contemporary art. As the editors suggest, contemporary aesthetics is a discipline under construction (p. 11).

Following a period in which theories and histories of art, art criticism, and artistic practice seemed to focus exclusively on political, social or empirical interpretations of art, aesthetics is being discovered as both a vital arena for discussion and as a valid interpretive approach outside its traditional philosophical domain

(back cover).

Without boring the reader with details, I will insert a reminder that aesthetics, beauty (a term often used in defining aesthetics) and art are not synonymous or necessarily interchangeable terms. Technically, aesthetics is the philosophical study of art, as originated in Greek times and then further expanded by Baumgarten in the 18th century and then even further by many of the great philosophers, especially Kant, Schiller and Hegel. Part one of the book addresses some of these issues from the perspective of art history, discussing the contribution of many of these philosophers.

This book, I am sure, will have the effect of awakening aesthetics from its present coma. Aesthetics was already stale and slumbering when the anti-aesthetic postmodernist movement put it into this coma. Diarmuid Costello's essay, "Retrieving Kant's Aesthetics for Art Theory after Greenberg," is a brilliant piece of work and shows just how much influence some critics have—for good or ill. "I take it uncontroversially—that the widespread marginalization of aesthetics in postmodern art theory may be attributed to the success of the art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg" (p. 117) [my italics].

It is my contention that any discussion regarding deep-seated human concerns such as aesthetics and linguistics that ignores biological underpinnings is doomed to be inadequate from the start. Like most other works on aesthetics, this book does not consider in any detail such biological traits as especially relevant to the discussion. Why humans need to make art, why beauty is such a perennial issue, needs to be considered in depth alongside the philosophical issues. I have made such a contribution to this side of the debate in a recently published paper—"Biobehavioral Basis of Art" [1]—that synthesizes the theories of Dissanayake and Joyce.

This criticism aside, I am sure this book will infuriate and challenge many readers, engage them at a deep intellectual level, pave the way for a new understanding of aesthetics and become a core text for many cultural theory, philosophy and art history courses.