by Jon Lackman | 4 January 2010 | Books, Theory
Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen, and Tony O’Connor have recently published a new edited volume Rediscovering Aesthetics that
brings together prominent international voices from art history, philosophy, and artistic practice to discuss the current role of aesthetics within and across their disciplines. 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 rediscovered both as a vital arena for discussion and a valid interpretive approach outside its traditional philosophical domain. This volume is distinctive, because it provides a selection of significant but divergent positions. The diversity of the views presented here demonstrates that a critical rethinking of aesthetics can be undertaken in a variety of (possibly incompatible) ways. The contributions open a transdisciplinary debate from which a new field of aesthetics may begin to emerge.
In one essay, Michael Ann Holly writes,
What is research in art history today anyway? Are the research paradigms now any closer to capturing the “truth,” the poetry, even the immediacy, of a work of art, or does “research” push them farther away? The research impulse is, in its own way, a mimetic impulse: the attempt to make the historical representation and the “real” coincide. Yet the “real” so often refuses to play the game of rationality … Granted, when the researcher emerges from either the library or the archive, facts have been discovered, connections have been made. But the romance of writing about the past has been squeezed out of our profession[.]
For more on the idea of “research” in art history, see the volume she recently edited with Marquard Smith, What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, which grew out of a seminar on this topic at the Clark Art Institute.
