Aesthetics after the End of Art

Abstract

Susan Buck-Morss teaches political philosophy and social theory in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is widely recognized as a leading scholar of the work of the Frankfurt School, especially the cultural criticism of T. W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Her book, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989), examines the unpublished notes and observations generated by Benjamin during the later part of his life on the experience of urban modernity and consumer culture in the nineteenth century. Buck-Morss's recent essays—including “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered”; “The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe”; and “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display”1—have set out a provocative new interpretation of the status of the aesthetic within contemporary culture. Buck-Morss has returned to the term's early definition to rethink the aesthetic in relationship to somatic or bodily knowledge under the impact of modernity. In response to a recent October questionnaire on “visual culture,” she writes of the “liquidation of art as we have known it” under the proliferation of techniques of reproduction, and calls for a new critical analysis of the “image as a social object” in which theory itself becomes a visual practice.2 The following interview took place through a series of telephone conversations and e-mail exchanges during July 1996. In it Buck-Morss discusses her recent work on the aesthetic and its significance for art making.