Aesthetic Life The Past and Present of Artistic Cultures

Abstract

This ambitious book is a sustained conservative defence of the concept of art in an age where ‘never before was so much art available, and never before did so little of it matter’ (p. vii). Harry Redner's central claim begins with the thought that the resources we need to understand the history of art-making are all but complete. We can, for the first time, look with confidence over the whole history of human art-making and attempt to discern its character and its significance. Moreover, the advent of the global technological culture makes all art available everywhere. Better still, one might think, almost every product our markets make is formed by aesthetic considerations so that the history of art is called upon to inform the ordinary things we use and have to hand. For Redner, however, the result is a disaster. Our technological world has delivered the means to create lives in which the distinctively human capacity for aesthetic experience is central. But, as a result, it has systematically denuded us of the practices, tools, and ideas, and even the desire, do exercise that capacity. As the concept of art has become diffused through the global culture, art itself has become merely a minor currency of celebrity whilst critical judgement consists in the whims of narrow élites. The global village is, like any other village, deeply parochial. In short, Redner's lament is that we live in a world in which we have made the institutional theory of art true and we are, consequently, headed for a new barbarism.