Post-modern aesthetics and psychoanalysis
Early-twentieth-century artists, poets and composers challenged
existing notions of beauty, broadening the scope of art and aesthetics.
In 1941,
Eli Siegel, American philosopher and poet, founded
Aesthetic Realism,
the philosophy that reality itself is aesthetic, and that "The world,
art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of
opposites."
[14][15]
Various attempts have been made to define Post-modern aesthetics. The
challenge to the assumption that beauty was central to art and
aesthetics, thought to be original, is actually continuous with older
aesthetic theory; Aristotle was the first in the Western tradition to
classify "beauty" into types as in his theory of drama, and Kant made a
distinction between beauty and the sublime. What was new was a refusal
to credit the higher status of certain types, where the taxonomy implied
a preference for tragedy and the sublime to comedy and the Rococo.
Croce suggested that “expression” is central in the way that beauty was once thought to be central.
George Dickie suggested that the sociological institutions of the art world were the glue binding art and sensibility into unities.
[16] Marshall McLuhan
suggested that art always functions as a "counter-environment" designed
to make visible what is usually invisible about a society.
[page needed] Theodor Adorno
felt that aesthetics could not proceed without confronting the role of
the culture industry in the commodification of art and aesthetic
experience.
Hal Foster attempted to portray the reaction against beauty and Modernist art in
The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture.
Arthur Danto has described this reaction as "kalliphobia" (after the Greek word for beauty - 'kalos').
[17] André Malraux
explains that the notion of beauty was connected to a particular
conception of art that arose with the Renaissance and was still dominant
in the eighteenth century (but was supplanted later). The discipline of
aesthetics, which originated in the eighteenth century, mistook this
transient state of affairs for a revelation of the permanent nature of
art.
[18] Brian Massumi suggests to reconsider beauty following the aesthetical thought in the philosophy of
Deleuze and
Guattari.
[19]
Daniel Berlyne
created the field of experimental aesthetics in the 1970s, for which he
is still the most cited individual decades after his death.
[20]
Pneumaist aestheticism is a theory of art and a highly experimental
approach to art negating historical preconceptions of the aesthetic.
Jean-François Lyotard re-invokes the Kantian distinction between
taste and the
sublime. Sublime painting, unlike
kitsch realism, "...will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain."
[21][22]
Sigmund Freud inaugurated aesthetical thinking in
Psychoanalysis mainly via the "Uncanny" as aesthetical affect.
[23] Following Freud and
Merleau-Ponty,
[24] Jacques Lacan theorized aesthetics in terms of sublimation and the Thing
[25]
Guy Sircello pioneered efforts in analytic philosophy to develop a rigorous theory of aesthetics, focusing on the concepts of beauty,
[26] love
[27] and sublimity.
[28] In contrast to romantic theorists Sircello argued for the objectivity of beauty and formulated a theory of love on that basis.
