tailieunhanh - THE AESTHETIC REVOLUTION AND ITS OUTCOMES

My point is not to encourage vandalism but to use it to query the effect that disability has on aesthetic appreciation. Vandalism modernizes art works, for better or worse, by inserting them in an aesthetic tradition increasingly preoccupied with disability. Only the historical unveiling of disability accounts for the aesthetic effect of vandalized works of art. Damaged art and broken beauty are no longer interpreted as ugly. Rather, they disclose new forms of beauty that leave behind a kitschy dependence on perfect bodily forms. . | JACQUES RANCIÈRE THE AESTHETIC REVOLUTION AND ITS OUTCOMES Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy At the end of the fifteenth of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that Man is only completely human when he plays and assures us that this paradox is capable of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living . We could reformulate this thought as follows there exists a specific sensory experience the aesthetic that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the aesthetic illusion as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach. You can say conversely that the statement and the promise were only too true and that we have experienced the reality of that art of living and of that play as much in totalitarian attempts at making the community into a work of art as in the everyday aestheticized life of a liberal society and its commercial entertainment. Caricatural as it may appear I believe this attitude is more pertinent. The point is that neither the statement nor the promise were ineffectual. At stake here is not the influence of a thinker but the efficacy of a plot one that reframes the division of the forms of our experience. new left review 14 mar apr 2002 133 134 NLR M This plot has taken shape in theoretical discourses and in practical attitudes in modes of individual perception and in social institutions museums libraries educational programmes and in commercial inventions as well. My aim is to try to understand the principle of its efficacy and of its various and antithetical mutations. How can the notion of aesthetics as a specific experience lead at once