This book presents a counter-history to the relentless critique of the humanist subject and authorial agency that has taken place over the past fifty years.
It is both an interrogation of that critique and the tracing of an alternative narrative from Romanticism to the twenty-first century which celebrates the agency of the artist as a powerful contribution to the wellbeing of the community. It does so through arguments based on philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory interspersed with case histories of particular artists. It also engages with a second issue that cannot be separated from the first. This is the question of what the role and purpose of art is in society. This has become particularly important since the 1990s because of the "social turn" in art in which it is claimed that the only valid role for art was one that had explicit social consequences. This book argues that a political role for art is valuable, but not the only one that can be envisaged nor indeed is it the most obvious or most important. Art has other social roles both as a means to engender empathy and community, and to re-enchant a world bereft of meaning and reduced to material values.
The book will appeal to practising artists as well as scholars working in art history, philosophy, aesthetics, and curatorial studies.
Author(s): Simon Blond
Series: Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 214
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Four Questions
1 The Emergence of the Romantic Subject
1.1 Subjectivity and the Enlightenment
1.2 Rousseau’s Reconceptualization of the Subject
1.2.1 The Two Types of Self Love
1.2.2 The Importance of Childhood
1.2.3 The Conditions for Authenticity
1.3 Francisco Goya 1746–1828
1.3.1 The Cabinet Pictures
1.3.2 Los Caprichos
1.3.3 The Disasters of War
1.3.4 The “Black Paintings”
1.4 Kant’s Subjectification of Aesthetic Judgement
1.4.1 Disinterestedness and Subjective Universality
1.4.2 Genius, Spirit, and Exemplary Originality
1.4.3 Later Misappropriations and Criticisms of Kant’s Critique
2 Art and Subjectivity in Post-Kantian Germany
2.1 The German Romantics and Idealists
2.1.1 The Counter-Enlightenment
2.1.2 Romantic Metaphysics
2.1.3 The Singularity of the Subject
2.1.4 The Communality of the Subject
2.2 Hegel’s Aesthetics
2.3 Nietzsche’s Quest for Meaning
2.4 Conclusion
3 The Battle for Modernism
3.1 Secularization, Disenchantment, and Spirituality
3.2 The Avant-Gardes of Modernism
3.2.1 The Aesthetic Avant-Garde
3.2.2 Aestheticism and the Autonomy of Art
3.2.3 Authenticity and Originality
3.2.4 The Freudian Subject
3.2.5 Primitivism and Spontaneity
3.2.6 Commodification and Kitsch
3.3 The Case of Die Brücke
3.4 The Anti-aesthetic Avant-Garde
3.4.1 Duchamp’s Style
3.4.2 The Readymade
3.4.3 Duchamp’s Indifference
4 The Critique of Autonomy and the Disavowal of Agency
4.1 Greenberg’s Autonomy
4.2 The Critique of Autonomous Art
4.3 The Re-enchantment of Society
4.4 Andy Warhol: The Man Who Became His Own Artwork
4.4.1 The Search for Originality
4.4.2 The Repudiation of Personal Style
4.4.3 The Factory and the Apparent Dispersal of Agency
4.4.4 Warhol’s “Dispersal of Agency”
4.4.5 Self-Negation and the Performance of Indifference
4.4.6 Warhol’s Pursuit and Manipulation of Celebrity
5 Appropriation and the Critique of Originality
5.1 Creativity Ex-Nihilo
5.2 The Uniqueness of the Subject and Personal Style
5.2.1 The Lacanian Subject
5.2.2 The Repudiation of Personal Style
5.2.3 Singularity of the Subject Guarantees Singularity of the Object
5.3 The Age of the Copy
5.3.1 Sherrie Levine
5.3.2 Elaine Sturtevant: From a Discourse of Copy to a Discourse of Energy
5.4 Frederick Jameson: Everything New Has Already Been Done
6 Social Art Practices Part 1: Production
6.1 Social Art Practices
6.2 Critique of the Sole Author
6.2.1 The Theological Argument
6.2.2 Singularity or Solidarity?
6.2.3 The Intrinsic Inter-subjectivity of the Subject: Jung, Winnacott, Buber, and Levinas
6.3 Models of Collaboration
6.3.1 Collaboration between Equals
6.3.2 Collaboration between Artists Who Are Each Assigned a Different Role
6.3.3 Collaboration with the Public under a Lead Artist
7 Social Art Practices Part II: The Art Object and the Ideology of Reception
7.1 The Art Object
7.1.1 The Continuing Critique of Autonomy
7.1.2 Commodification Anxiety
7.1.3 Benjamin’s Auratic Object
7.1.4 The Afterlife of the Object
7.2 Reception: The Problem of Evaluation
7.2.1 Evaluation Based on Social Effect
7.2.2 Contemplative Enjoyment as Negation of Critique
7.2.3 The Assumption of Passive Spectatorship
7.2.4 Critique of the Institution
7.2.5 A New Public for Art
7.3 Reception in a Monumental Time Frame
7.4 Democratic Evaluation as a Category Error
7.5 The Exclusion of Democratic Art Practices
Conclusion
Cited Sources
Index
