Intellectual Map of Domestic Aesthetics: To the Results of the Work of the Second Russian Congress of Aesthetics

Abstract

The article is an overview of a prominent scientific event — The Second Russian Congress of Aesthetics (Yekaterinburg, July 2021). The paper assesses the state of aesthetics as a scientific and educational discipline throughout its history of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The article highlights four stages of the Soviet history of aesthetics. The first stage, the 1930s, received following K. Clark, the nomination “return of aesthetics”, which was associated with the general conservative turn of the Stalinist cultural policy, the creation of the socialist realist canon, the program of building socialism, the denial of the functionalism of the previous (avant-garde) stage. The “return of aesthetics” had not only a political and pragmatic content but contributed to the saturation of Soviet culture with fragments of the classical heritage, primarily the philosophical one. At the second stage (late Stalinism), there was a rollback of aesthetics in the direction of extreme political instrumentalization. During a short period of the “thaw,” aesthetics began to go behind public liberal discourse, yielding leadership to journalism and art criticism. At the stage of the “long seventies”, aesthetics becomes an influential and in-demand scientific discipline, included in the program of “technical progress” and “education of the builder of communism”, important ideological, aesthetic, and applied tasks are assigned to aesthetics since it is expected to influence all spheres of life. Aesthetics as philosophy and science develops, responding to contacts with semiotics, psychology, anthropology, cultural history, and sociology. Relying on the selective stream of translations of Western art philosophy, Soviet aesthetics begins to resonate with world trends, which is facilitated by the tacit consensus of the idea of aesthetics as a part of philosophical and humanitarian knowledge that has its autonomy. The state of aesthetics in the 1990s and early 2000s is qualified as a change of scientific generations and the emergence of new groups of professionals in aesthetic and artistic knowledge, not related to academic aesthetics, forming their conceptual vision of the development of art and aesthetics relations. The current state of aesthetics was diagnosed with a brief description of the last 15 years, when contacts with foreign aesthetic schools became regular and academic aesthetics began to be in demand in master’s educational programs, intellectual venues for festivals, and biennials of contemporary art, and cultural management programs. A large portion of the article is devoted to the analysis of the composition of the participants, their professional interests and competencies, the frequent concepts discussed in the sections, the structure of polemical problems, and crosscutting topics of all congress participants.