Kunst als menschliche Praxis. Eine Ästhetik by Georg W. Bertram (review)

In Kunst als menschliche Praxis, Georg Bertram (Freie Universität Berlin) seeks no less than to provide a corrective of conventional views of art as autonomous. In critiquing the prevailing paradigm that highlights the singularity of art as a product or object (Gegenstand), Bertram underscores the degree to which art is a dynamic process, the production of which cannot be separated from its reception. In encouraging a move from primarily analyzing the defining characteristics of artworks to a more holistic view of art as a cultural practice, fundamental questions guide the reader throughout the book; what is art, how do we produce it, and why do we engage with it?

The common theme of these fundamental questions emerges in Chapter 1, in which Bertram takes up views held by Theodor Adorno, Christoph Menke, and Arthur Danto. Bertram argues that these thinkers represent an array of conventional approaches to aesthetics that differ in specifics yet share an emphasis on art's ultimate elusiveness. That is, art is marked by its being or representing something highly unusual. Bertram doesn't dismiss this idea, but rather asks to which degree art as a cultural practice also bears on the usual. Bertram urges a move away from focusing on art's distinctiveness towards looking at art's practical relevance in our lives. Throughout the book, Bertram consistently returns to revised takes on what constitutes art. In Chapter 2, we are reminded of Kant's and Hegel's respective approaches to aesthetics, who began to highlight the reflective moment inherent in aesthetic experience. Bertram, however, makes the case that they did not go far enough in drawing out practical implications in addition to their theoretical ones (79). Chapter 3 extends this analysis by elaborating on the practical implications of our modes of engagement with art, of which Bertram identifies four main types: physical, perceptive, emotional, and symbolic (126). Through these various modes of engagement, artists and recipients alike are engaged in articulating the structures and relations manifested within a work of art (122). In this sense, art indeed maintains a certain degree of autonomy, as the work itself contains themes, structures, and relations. But autonomy is only one aspect of art's dynamic process. Bertram also insists that articulations of art—verbal or other—offer more than mere explication of what is already implicitly contained in a given work of art (213). In his closing Chapter 4, Bertram then argues that such normative-evaluative articulation is not merely subjective, but that it finds its objective basis in the world of art recipients (201).

Bertram does well to highlight the dynamic nature of art as cultural practice, and his choice of the term "articulation" to describe this practice provides an intriguing point of connection to Charles Taylor's reflections on language summarized in his recent book The Language Animal. Yet, as central as "practice" is for this work, and as much as Bertram emphasizes our engagement with art as relevant for other forms and dimensions of human practice, explications of just how our articulations feed into other settings remain rather scarce. Bertram makes these most explicit when he discusses the two examples of looking at a painting and watching a movie (141–143). As he explains, our engagement with these as works of art will also impact how we visually engage with our everyday surroundings (painting example), or prompt linguistic engagement with concepts explicated in fictional accounts (film example). They foster an imaginative engagement on the recipients' part (143).

Throughout the book, Bertram describes our engagement with art as both normative-evaluative and normative-pragmatic. The book articulates the evaluative and pragmatic dimensions quite well, but only all too briefly touches on the question of how broadly art helps to articulate normativity. As part of Bertram's critique concerns conventional views of artistic autonomy, he surely thinks that art addresses normativity outside of its own realm, i.e., outside of mere aesthetic accomplishment (ästhetisches Gelingen) (193–196). Many questions remain concerning art...