The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (review)

REVIEWS CaUnescu notes that a reader may reread to pick up riddles, quotes, aUusions, or puns, or to admire an arrangement ofplot or ironies of any kind—but there is for him no reader who would look forward to coming again upon a certain wonderful and evocative phrase which asks in its context to be loved rather than merely unriddled. Reading CaUnescu's post-postmodern book makes more obvious the degree to which recent criticism has dropped the concepts ofthe pleasurable and the beautiful. Walton's rumination on make-believe is as near as CaUnescu gets. CaUnescu knows "beautiful" writing is just bad writing —he's a smart enough postmodern for that. The idea of pleasure makes him very uncomfortable, unless the pleasure is related to a Hobbesian "sudden glory," the sense of a refound and freshly funded superiority. There is no co-operation and no love lost between Reader and Writer. What CaUnescu's notion ofrereading resists—and very steadüy resists—is the idea that the Author might have the glamour ofpower over the Reader. He scorns the old idea that a reader might be held in thraU (thatis, subjugated) by a book, that the book might (as people used to say) enchant a reader, put a speU on him—that the Author is, as Horace says of the dramatist "ut magus," master of an art which is comparable to witchcraft. Only chüdren and women respond to any literature lüce that. There is no power to which the good (proud) reader must submit. A Reader is a cracker ofcodes, a hermeneut ofcontrol, and such a powerful wizard need never submit to being deUghted. Margaret Anne Doody Vanderbilt University MARTHAWOODMANSEE. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. xvi + 200pp. Martha Woodmansee issues a chaUenge to all those who persist in beUeving that art and aesthetics inhabit some eternal realm high above the mess of history. KristeUer's path-breaking article, "The Modern System ofthe Arts," now more than forty years old, has been duly noted yet often tamed for a pedagogy that keeps up a discussion of aesthetic "problems" deemed constant from Plato to postmodernism. Woodmansee 's "rereading" of this modern tradition proposes to historicize some ofits aspects, in particular the notion that the artwork is autonomous , entire unto itself (just like a hedgehog, said Friedrich Schlegel). Moreover, she wishes to lower the tone of discussion several degrees by naming the material factors that led to the replacement of a moral or "instrumentalist" conception by a model ofartistic autonomy we perhaps take for granted; these factors include reading and distribution practices, critical reviews, copyright law, rhetorical prescription, as well as changing conceptions of authorship and textual authority. As Arthur Danto Vol. 19 (1995): 142 THE COMPAKATIST fairly observes in his admiring introduction, Woodmansee offers an account from below, and one that presupposes discontinuity between successive discourses rather than a continuous tradition of"Art." (Wisely or disingenuously, she keeps süent on the issue ofhow we are to conceive of art before it became "Art," how to write its supposed prehistory.) The argument has several components. One line, pursued in a chapter on "the policing of reading," traces the motivation of social prestige. From this vantage, Addison's Spectator essays appear less as theory than as a kind ofcourtesy book recommending conversation about the arts as a means of refining middle-class manners. EnthusiasticaUy taken up in Germany, such a goal ofmoral improvement later generated a furious debate—reminiscent of contemporary exchanges on cultural Uteracy—about how to regulate the emotional excesses of reading, how in short to distinguish high from low culture. A chapter on "the engendering of art" glances at a side effect of the universal autonomy of the Uterary work: intentionally or not, the theory served to marginalize a feminine art or reading public. A writer such as Sophie La Roche, respected as weU as enormously popular in her day, is now remembered (if at all) only as Wieland's muse. Two chapters explore the "interests of disinterestedness,"whereby the Kantian doctrine turns out to have a less than exalted motivation. Woodmansee traces a paradoxical Unk...